


astronomy (in reverse)

by antarcticas



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Beaches, Childhood Friends, Constellations, Ember Island (Avatar), Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, First Love, Growing Up, Miscommunication, Multi, Mythology References, NaNoWriMo 2020, No War AU, Secret Identity, Teen Romance, Young Love, Zutara, a lot of influence from different cultures, and also cute small zutara :), and tales told in ATLA world, little zuko would definitely write katara fanfiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:14:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 20,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27324847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antarcticas/pseuds/antarcticas
Summary: A hundred years after Sozin's plans fail, the four nations co-exist in harmony.In this world, Katara and Zuko are raised traveling yearly to Ember Island, left to their own devices while their parents play politics. There are plenty of memories to be formed on the island coast—and falling in love comes all too easy. Sandcastles, stargazing, and surrender define their youth.Sometimes, it feels too good.(Perhaps Ember Island is just one of the many stories they paint across the night sky.)
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 132
Kudos: 193





	1. Horn

**The Twenty Eight Mansions** **  
****_Azure Dragon of the East_ ** **_  
_**

##  _Jiao, ‘Horn’_

'The journey of a 1000 miles begins with one step.’ (Chinese Proverb)

* * *

  
  
  


“Come on,” Sokka says, tugging at Katara’s hands. She almost drops the little bag she’s holding, a small pouch covered in beading Gran-Gran had sewn for her before they’d left the South Pole. “I want to go to the beach.”

Kya glances at her children before continuing up the steps to their relatively large Ember Island home. “We’ll put everything away, and then beach time. Okay, Sokka?”

The little boy pouts for a moment before they get to the top of the stairs. Hakoda waits patiently at the top for his wife and children to join him and then he pushes open the door. 

The house is crowned in foliage, and the wind waves through the trees around it. Leaves mask its behind, so that all that is currently visible is a bright blue front door, painted orientally. A small porch hinders their steps, carved more for aesthetic than proper use. Overall, the image is dramatic, if not practical.

“This is a big house,” Katara says, amazed, and Sokka nods solemnly next to her, his wolf-tail bouncing in the air. “Do we get to keep it?”

“Yes,” Kya responds, leaning down and moving one of her daughter’s carefully beaded hair-loops out of her face, behind her ear. “We get to keep it,” she laughs. Hakoda chuckles heartily before swiping Katara up into his arms and stepping inside. The room the family walks into is dark at first, and Katara struggles to get down. When she escapes her father’s arms, she and Sokka both run to the curtains that hide the windows from their view. The soft red and blue makes way to carefully chosen and placed furniture. 

“This room is so big,” Sokka jumps forward and splays his face into the collection of cushions on one end. “I’m going to sleep here.”

“This is a Fire Nation home. We all get our own rooms.”

“What?” Katara glances up from where she’s staring at ornate dragons, carved into a metal table. 

“Our own rooms.”

“But this is already so big.” The little girl twists her eyebrows together. Kya laughs and grabs her by the arm, taking her through a back-door and into a wide hallway. Hakoda and Sokka join them from behind, and the children both stare in awe at the sheer size of this new abode. “Oh. It’s different.”

“It is,” Hakoda smiles, pulling his family together as they pause in the hallway of one room, flush against him. Their cheeks are all red and blushing as they look at the blue bedspread. “This can be Katara’s room.”

Katara runs in and jumps on the bed, her hair falling around her like a halo. She sinks into the warmth of the coverlet and the air on her bare skin, so unlike the cold she’s accustomed to. “Can we stay here forever?”

“Wouldn’t you miss home?”

Katara’s eyebrows scrunch, and she lies back further, staring at the ceiling and placing her hands over her stomach. “Yes. I’d miss Gran-Gran,” she pronounces. “We _must_ go back.”

“We will,” Hakoda chuckles. “But we’ll come back here, too. Every spring, for the International Summit. Then we’ll go back home.”

Sokka sees another side to that, tugging at his mother’s arm. “That means we get to go on the boat. A lot.”

“We will.” Sokka reaches over and opens Katara’s window, and a burst of sunlight floods over them. The water-tribe family basks in the silence for moments. The ocean’s waves are hypnotic, visible from here. This isn’t their home, but it’s already someplace special. 

When she tires of the sun’s rays, Katara jumps off the bed, running over to Sokka. She tugs at his arm and smiles. “Beach time.”

He turns to their parents, who have their hands around each other. “Can we go to the beach? Please?”

They’ve both been raised amongst water—Katara is a waterbender—but the ice of the South Pole isn’t conducive to the fun they’d seen other kids having on the walk here. There they do not have sand, and the water is too icy to swim in. Katara has been practicing her bending with Master Pakku for a long time, and she knows how to heat up water, and turn it into shapes, but she has never swum in it. He calls her a prodigy, but she’s still learning. Maybe she would learn faster if she got to sink into water that didn’t freeze her. 

A quick nod from Kya is all it takes for Sokka to grab Katara’s hand and run outside with her. They’re dressed in an amalgamation of cloth, a Southern Water Tribe style mirrored onto Fire Nation cotton with embroidery from the Earth Kingdom, draped almost like the Air Nomads do. They’re here for unity, after all. It’s different from the heavy clothing they are used to, but it feels nice. 

There are trees that ring the area around their new house, done in shades of vibrant, bright green that they have rarely seen before. Everything here, in the Fire Nation, is alive—the South Pole is beautiful, but in a way that is icy, dark and dangerous. The ground underneath Katara’s feet, which soon turns to sand, is so unfamiliar. It is less stable than the ice of the pole or the metal of their ship, but also more solid than the snow they’re used to. She stops her brother as he goes forward, reaching down to pull her fingers through the granules of earth. 

“Sokka! Look.”

Sokka is an innovator first and foremost, and he fashions himself as the leader of all of their missions. He leans down next to her and nods at the sand, his hand on his chin. “Interesting,” he says, before pointing out to where some other young children are on the beach. “They’re making stuff out of it!”

“What stuff?” Katara questions. Her eyes widen when she sees several other children near the water, placing wet hands against the shore. They touch the water and then the sand, and it darkens and then changes, molds to their touch. “Oh. That’s cool.”

“What are they building?” Sokka wonders aloud. He picks her up, and they finish running to the shore—almost. Katara grows nervous when she sees the other children more clearly, and her feet scuff against the ground. Sokka has no such qualms, and he drags her out with him until they’re right across from them. 

There are five children, three girls and two boys, and they all look different from Sokka and Katara. Their clothes are all a Fire Nation red. Two of them look similar, with pale skin and twin ponytails, a sister and brother. Then there is a girl dressed in pink with bright brown hair, one who is skinny and sallow, and a stocky boy with tan skin. They are all creating something in the sand. 

They don’t look particularly nice, and Katara kind of wants to walk away from them. She doesn’t have that many friends at the South Pole, because the other kids don’t really like that she’s good at bending. She’s never been good at friends. Sokka, however, has no such inhibitions. He smiles at them widely, and starts talking, introducing them. “Hi! I’m Sokka, and this is my sister Katara.”

One of the girls, the one who looks part of a pair, crosses her hands petulantly over her chest. “Peasants aren’t allowed to be here,” she sniffs.

“We’re not peasants,” Katara fires back, hotly. “We’re from the Southern Water Tribe delegation! Who are _you?”_

“We’re representatives from the Fire Nation,” she responds. “You can call me Princess—”

“Mom said to be nice, Azula,” the boy speaks up from behind the angry girl. He looks a little nervous as he sizes them up, and his words are nice, but his expression is tight. “I’m Zuko and this is Azula. She’s my sister. We’re from the Fire Nation delegation.”

Sokka frowns at the girl, whose face is raised haughtily. The other three are standing at the side. “Are you, like, royalty or something?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Who are you?” Katara interrupts, her gaze landing on the others. 

“I’m Ty Lee,” the one dressed in pink says happily. She tugs at the arm of the girl next to her, but sighs like she isn’t surprised when sad and gloomy refuses to move. “This is Mai. She’s really nice!”

“I’m Chan,” the large boy continues. He’s staring at Katara strangely. She really can’t tell why. Sokka sees him, though, and moves in front of her. 

“Can we play with you?” Sokka asks. Katara blushes, nervous. “We’ve never played in sand.”

“It’s getting late,” Azula says haughtily. 

Zuko steps back a little, but places a hand on his sister’s shoulder. “You can—”

“Play with us tomorrow!” Ty Lee finishes, vivacious. Her hair, braided, bounces. “We’ll be here earlier. But it’s _bedtime,”_ she sings. 

“Oh.” Sokka says, blinking at her. He’s starting to smile in a way that’s a little dopey. “That’s nice.”

Katara frowns at her brother and digs her toes into the sand, grabbing his hand and pulling him away. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Welcome to astronomy (in reverse), acronym air. This is my project for NaNoWriMo 2020, so I will (hopefully!) be updating daily throughout the month of November. 
> 
> This story takes place in three parts, inspired by sects of Chinese astronomy. The world of Avatar took a lot of liberties with constellations—all we really have is Katara's star chart—so I'm going to be using a few to fit this story into Avatar-verse, but hopefully stick tight to cultural influences. If you have any complaints/questions, please let me know! I'm drawing from my own experiences and knowledge and a lot of vague research in the writing of this. 
> 
> These three parts are 'The Twenty-Eight Mansions', 'The Southern Asterisms', and 'Three Enclosures'. I'll briefly explain the latter two once we get to that point. 
> 
> **The Twenty-Eight Mansions:**
> 
> Astronomy in China, Arabia, and India evolved differently than the West. One common aspect all of those forms shared in common was the usage of twenty-seven or eight mansions, likely because the moon completed her rotation between that time-span. In China these are called _Hsiu_ or mansions; in Arabia they are _manzil al-kamar_ or mansions of the moon; in India they are _naksatra_ or asterisms. 
> 
> In China, each of these twenty-eight mansions has a name, and they are split into four phases (corresponding with the seasons). This is the Azure Dragon of the East, Black Tortoise of the North, White Tiger of the West, and Vermilion Bird of the South. Each of these seasons has seven parts, also named. The meaning of all of these is not clear, although the Chinese and Arabic meanings of several of these symbols seem to match. Some say that they were used as placeholders to name constellations, but a lot of this meaning is lost. 
> 
> Like ATLA does, I'm drawing from several cultures in the writing of this. The system used above states the Chinese mansions specifically. 
> 
> Each of the quotes I'm using will be quotes or proverbs of Eastern influence. This is a decently light-hearted fic, but constellation conversations—and growing up—is a large part of it, and I wanted to keep the writing symbolistic. 
> 
> More about the Chinese mansions [here.](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/70360088.pdf)
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! I'm so glad to be on this journey with this amazing fandom. Catch me over on tumblr @antarcticasx!
> 
> —Dee


	2. Neck

**The Twenty-Eight Mansions** **  
****_Azure Dragon of the East_ ** **_  
_**

##  _Kàng, ‘Neck’_

'Listening well is as powerful as talking well, and is also as essential to true conversation.’ (Chinese Proverb)

* * *

  
  
  


“That girl was really pretty,” Sokka says dreamily. Katara glares at him and tries to tug him back to their house. There’s plenty of land on the other side of it, near the ocean, away from the area the other kids had been yesterday. 

“I don’t want to talk to them. That girl seemed mean,” she tells her brother. He frowns at her. 

“Just because that one girl was mean didn’t mean the rest were. They seemed really nice. Except that guy. He was looking at you weird.”

“No he wasn’t!”

“Yes, he was,” Sokka shakes his head firmly, the way he always does when he plays chief. “So you need to stay away from him.”

“That’s not fair! You’re staying next to that girl, whatever her name is—”

Sokka blushes. “I don’t even know her.”

“Oh,” Katara teases. “You have a _crush . . .”_

That doesn’t really end up mattering, because by the time they make their way to the same spot the other kids were yesterday, they only see two kids. It’s the girl and boy in the matching ponytails. Katara frowns, because she already doesn’t like that girl. Her brother seemed fine, but she was mean yesterday. 

“You’re here early,” Azula sniffs. “We thought you wouldn’t come.”

“She thought,” Zuko whispers under his breath. Katara looks at him curiously. He’s not as outspoken as his sister, but he doesn’t seem shy. Just reluctant to talk. 

Sokka crosses his hands over his chest and stares down the Fire Nation girl. “Where’s everyone else? Like Ty Lee, and Mai—”

“And Chan,” Katara chimes in. Sokka sends her a dirty look, and Azula tosses her hair behind her shoulder. 

“They weren’t allowed to come with us today. Mother said that we required _bonding_ time.” She glares at Zuko with disgust that isn’t at all veiled, and he sticks out the corner of his tongue at her. 

“Couldn’t they come anyway?”

Zuko runs his toes through the sand. The Fire Nation outfits both the siblings are wearing aren’t like Katara and Sokka’s, a little bit of everything—they are just red, red, red. Katara doesn’t really know much about politics, so she doesn’t know what that means. She hopes Zuko will respond, though. Zuko seems nicer to talk to than Azula. Azula just doesn’t seem very nice. 

He doesn’t speak. “They’re just average nobles. _We_ have to allow them access here. They can go spend their time on the regular beach. It’s for _peasants,”_ she pronounces heavily. Then she narrows her eyes onto both of them. “I suppose that you’re not peasants, if you’re here.”

“We told you. We’re from the Southern Water Tribe delegation,” Katara bites back before Sokka can say a word. Azula’s calculating gold eyes stare at her as though they’re looking into her soul. 

“Southern Water Tribe. Are you a waterbender?”

Katara feels like she has something to prove, so she reaches a hand out towards the ocean and pulls a wave to her. The water encases her hand and turns into a tentacle. She raises it in the air and up again, creating a hypnotic and only mildly threatening movement. 

Zuko intakes a little bit of breath, and it startles her enough to drop the little whip onto the sand. It turns the granules dark and moist. 

“Are you a bender?” she challenges. Azula smirks. 

“Me and Zuko are both benders. But I’m way better.”

Zuko looks affronted, and he opens his mouth and says so. “I’m a good bender.”

“And that’s why you have to use swords?” Azula twists, her attention diverting from the water tribe siblings. 

Sokka interjects. “You can use swords?”

“Yeah,” Zuko says, ignoring Azula. Katara stares at the sand sink up her water. “I use dual dao broadswords.”

“Only non-benders use swords.”

“Hey! I’m a nonbender.”

Azula turns red at that. “I—I—”

Katara is very, very confused. She stares at Azula, whose face is struggling between embarrassment and haughty calm; at Zuko, whose features are bright red and somewhat nervous; at Sokka, whose visage is somewhere between affronted and intrigued. 

“Can we go back home?” she asks Sokka. “I don’t want to play with them.”

“I wanna learn about swords,” he says, and he and Zuko share some sort of little-boy connection. Katara reaches up and stage-whispers in his ear. 

“I don’t like her. She’s not very nice.”

“She’s not,” she hears under her breath, and when she turns, she sees Zuko staring at the sun with an incredible amount of fascination. 

“Wait.” Azula steps forward. “I suppose that if you were allowed to come here, I _can_ let you play with us.”

“Oh _thank you,_ your majesty,” Katara says sarcastically. Azula preens. Zuko moves ahead. 

“It’s dinnertime, Azula.”

_Now,_ for whatever reason, Azula seems disappointed. Her gold eyes dip down before she lurches up and tugs at Zuko’s arm. “Zuzu! Let’s sneak out tonight!” Before Zuko can get a word in, she smiles coquettishly up at Sokka. “You guys should come play with us later!”

“Will Ty Lee be there?” Sokka asks. Azula’s eyebrows draw in, and Katara winces, making eye contact with a resigned Zuko. _Should we come?_ She asks him with her eyes. He shrugs at her, and she decides to take a chance, because Azula might be weird, but it would still be nice to have a friend. 

“It doesn’t matter. C’mon. We’ll come back later.”

Sokka pouts. “Fine.”

As they head back, he drones on about the little girl dressed in pink they’d seen yesterday. “I liked her hair. It was a big braid, different than yours, and she seemed so nice . . .”

Before Katara tugs him back through the thicket, she turns behind her to see Zuko and Azula walking to their own home. She sighs. 


	3. Root

**The Twenty-Eight Mansions** **  
** **_Azure Dragon of the East_ ** **_  
_ **

##  _Dī, ‘Root’_

‘Learning in childhood is like engraving on a stone.’ (Arabic Proverb)

* * *

  
  
  


“We’re gonna get in trouble,” Katara whispers, but Sokka drags her into the clearing anyway. She looks behind her to the dark spot that is their house, completely unilluminated, and whimpers. Sokka startles too when he sees the utter blackness behind them, but he, of course, needs to stay strong—so he doesn’t pull them back. 

“Look! Azula and Zuko are already here,” he says. Indeed they are, though Azula seems to be pulling Zuko just like Sokka is tugging Katara. 

“What are we even going to _do?”_ she complains. When they’d first walked out onto the sand barefoot, their feet had frozen, and they’d had to sneak back inside and get sandals. “We can’t play in the sand. And it’s dark.”

They’re close enough for Azula to overhear, then, and she answers with her usual imperious tone. “Nighttime is the best. We can light a fire!”

“Someone will see us,” Zuko groans. As the Fire Nation kids grow closer, Katara can make out that he’s holding something underneath his arm. Perhaps a blanket? Azula pouts at him, but the action doesn’t fit on her face—it really just makes her seem malicious. She points an eyebrow to a spot a ways away. 

“That part of the beach is covered in rock. Nobody will be able to see us.”

It’s sort of odd that someone her own age knows such a good hiding spot, and Katara really wants to question why, but Sokka is swept up in himself. He starts heading in that direction, addressing Azula. “Why didn’t you bring Ty Lee?”

“She didn’t want to come,” the girl bites. “She thought you were weird.”

Azula’s tone sounds oddly stuffy, and Katara turns around to see Zuko sniffling a laugh into his arm. She pulls back from Sokka and lets him and Azula hash out their argument about the pink-clothed little one, falling into pace next to him. 

“Hi.”

“Hi,” he says roughly. She points to his blanket. 

“What’s that for?”

He shrugs. “Azula likes to play with fire and tell spooky stories at night. I like to lie down and look at the stars.”

Katara raises her head at the sky below, and for the first time realizes that it looks very, very different from the one she knows. The South Pole’s sky is painted a dark black, and the amount of lights which dot it, in all colors, can be overwhelming. Ember Island’s sky seems somewhat brighter, and there are not as many bright white stars in the sky, even if there are a lot. 

She scrunches her eyebrows together as they walk forward, realizing that this sky is very different than the one she knows. She voices that, too, more a thought to herself than anyone else, but Zuko listens and responds quietly. 

“It’s because of pollution. We have more of that here,” he says sadly. Katara frowns. 

“What’s that?”

“Factories and things. You don’t have a lot of those in the south.” She still looks confused, and he continues like he’s proud of his knowledge. “The factories create chemicals, and it goes into the sky, and makes it harder to see the stars.”

“Oh. That’s very sad.”

Zuko turns towards her, his expression indecipherable as they reach the tiny alcove. Sokka and Azula are already there, and Katara blinks when she sees a shower of sparks erupt in front of her, a bright, brilliant blue. Suddenly, there is a fire in the middle of the clearing, lighting wood that had already been placed there. It’s hot, and it makes her want to screech, but she doesn’t. 

“Why is your fire—” 

“Azula is a prodigy,” Zuko continues. This is the first time he’s talked so much, and it feels sort of good to be having a conversation. “Her fire is really hot, so it’s blue.” 

“I’m a prodigy too!” she says excitedly. That causes his expression, almost understanding, to completely fall—he takes his giant blanket and places it in front of the fire, facing the ocean and the moon. Sokka and Azula are both sitting down on a log, trading glares, and she doesn’t want to get in the middle of that. There’s room on Zuko’s blanket, even if he doesn’t seem happy— 

Maybe he’s just always grumpy. Whatever. She walks around the fire, the heat fading into her bones, and lies down on the blanket next to him. They’re far apart, and it’s sort of awkward, but it’s also _fine._

Katara takes solace in staring at the moon, and all the new stars which surround it. True to her element, she feels an intimate connection to the moon spirit—she might not be at full strength today, but just the object itself in her sight makes her calm. Her shoulders react, imperceptibly, and she crawls up into herself. 

Then minutes pass, and she gets bored. She turns behind her and sees Azula tossing tiny balls of fire around in her palms, to Sokka’s amusement. At her side, Zuko is staring reverently at the universe above. She stares at him for a minute, and then two, and when he doesn’t move at _all_ she reaches out and taps him on the shoulder. He looks at her quizzically. 

“Are you okay? You weren’t moving,” she says with great concern. Then she rests a finger on her cheek and adds on, “I’m bored. I wanna do what you’re doing.”

He almost looks like he wants to be annoyed for a moment. “Go to Azula. Do your prodigy thing.”

“No. I want to know what you’re doing,” she insists, because she’s curious. She bends up a little and pokes at his shoulder again, and he moves back. 

“I was sort of meditating,” he says. “I usually do it in the morning, but my uncle says that practicing at night might be good.”

“Medi-ditating?” 

“It’s like . . . thinking very, very deeply. Usually I do it when the sun comes up, to connect with Agni. But I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, and my uncle says that Agni always exists, and that if I can find peace with him while the moon is up, I might become a good firebender.”

The last words give him away, but she doesn’t really dwell on that. “You do a lot of reading. How old are you?”

“I’m twelve,” he says proudly. “And I do a lot of reading. And I study a lot. And I meditate a lot.” Then he sighs. “Azula is cooler than me, though. She doesn’t need to do any of that to be better than me.”

Katara frowns and leans closer to him. They’re talking in low whispers, so that Sokka and Azula can’t really hear them. “But you work really hard, and that’s super cool. I think,” she musters up all of her ten-year-old wisdom, “that makes you better than her.”

“Really?"

“Well, you’re nice,” she says. “Azula is mean. Being nice is always cool.”

“You think I’m nice?”

“I think you’re smart, and you do stuff like medi-meditate, and you read a lot.” Then her mind jumps to another conclusion. “Oh! Do you know any stories?”

“Stories?”

“My mom tells me a lot of them, like about Tui and La, and the Spirit Oasis. Do you have stories in the Fire Nation too? You must know,” she surmises, “because you read a lot.”

“I—yeah,” Zuko breathes out, his golden eyes reflecting the stars back at her. “Yeah, I know a lot of stories.”

  
  
  



	4. Room

**The Twenty-Eight Mansions** **  
****_Azure Dragon of the East_ ** **_  
_**

##  _Fáng, ‘Room’_

“The right path is steep and upwards, the wrong path is easy and horizontal.” (Mizo Proverb)

* * *

  
  


Zuko moves over until there’s more room on the blanket for her. His expression had changed when she’d mentioned stories; his eyes had grown alight, and a strange character had befallen his face. Katara can deduce, from all of this, that Zuko likes stories—like Zuko likes meditation, and quiet. He’s so different from her, and Sokka, and even Azula. She feels like he isn’t ordinarily a super peaceful person, but he seems like that— 

It doesn’t matter. She can think about that later. Right now, she wants to hear what he has to say. Her parents and her Gran-Gran and all of the elders of her tribe have spoken vividly to her about the tales of Tui and La, and all of the other spirits that exist in the icy south. There are stories painted across her sky, and they are ones she holds dear, but she thinks that the ones Zuko has might be different.

He rolls over and faces her, slightly, though his hand points out towards the sky, at a cluster of stars. Katara turns to look at him, but he shakes his head and stabs his finger upward. “Do you see those stars?”

“Yeah.” She can see a cluster in the air. 

“Count them, in that circle thing.”

“Oh.” That’s strange, but maybe there’s a lot of math in the Fire Nation. Maybe the numbers are the story. She squints her eyes and silently mouths the numbers as they pass her vision. “Six,” she says confidently.

“Nopes,” he pops. “There are seven.”

“No there aren’t—oh, wait.” There are. “Why does that matter, anyway?”

“Do you know who Agni is?”

She does, slightly. Agni is who the Fire Nation worships, an ancient from the Spirit World. The nations of the world have an overlapping belief in the world beyond, but they all perceive it differently. “He’s religion, or something.”

“Sort of,” Zuko says. “Do you know what Fire Sages are?”

“I don’t,” Katara says crossly. After this she’s going to tell Zuko a story about Tui and La, and the water-spirits that traverse the ice fronts of the South Pole, and he won’t know what those are. She doesn’t follow up, but he picks it back anyway. 

“The Fire Sages are the ones who help the . . . Fire Nation royal family. They hold the fire power from the spirits, and from Agni.”

“Don’t you have dragons?”

“Sort of. It’s complicated.”

She twists up again. “Do you know the Fire Lord?”

“I—” Zuko breathes in deeply. “Let me explain, okay?”

He doesn’t seem very angry with her, however. She checks in again on Sokka and Azula, morbid curiosity filling her. She almost expects her brother to be dead, but he isn’t. He’s leaning back in his seat, _laughing_ at something Azula is saying—or perhaps _at_ Azula. She almost expects the blue-fired girl to roast him, but she bites her lip and wears a shy smile. 

Now, _that_ is something she will have to dwell on later, because Zuko keeps talking, getting louder when she turns back. “There are a lot of Fire Sages, and more are ordained whenever some die.”

“What does that mean?”

“What?”

“Or-dain-whatever.”

“Oh. Um,” he blushes, and one of his hands moves up and rubs the back of his neck. “I don’t . . . know. I think it’s something like . . . becoming a Fire Sage. But I learned that in school. It isn’t a part of the story. It’s just for background.”

“Can you get to the story, then?” The night is somewhat chilly, and Katara feels like that shouldn’t bother her—she is, after all, a child of ice. Still, she shakes, and in a strange instant Zuko moves slightly closer to her. Before she can wonder why, a small flame comes to life in the middle of his palm. He winces, like it’s hard to control, and it changes shape and size, unlike Azula’s.

In the South Pole, fires are used to keep people warm, and they are used to cook, and stories and tales and marriages and spiritual ceremonies are all told around a blazing flame in the center courtyard. It’s different here, but the heat is familiar. Perhaps she should be worried by the fact that a firebender is so near, but she’s simply not. She doesn’t think he will burn her. 

“I’m going to tell you the story of Agni and the first Fire Sages,” he says. Then he points back up to the stars they’ve neglected. “Those seven stars are the first seven Fire Sages.”

“They’re stars,” Katara deadpans, just to be contrary, and Zuko glares at her. “Okay, fine. What happened?”

“So, once upon a time, maybe even before there was an Avatar, there were a lot of sages. And there were these seven sages that were a super big deal. They were the original Fire Sages, and they were semi-immortal, but also not.”

“What does that mean?”

“Immortal?”

He seems proud of himself for that one. “Semi-immortal means that they lived for a super long time, but they eventually died. Much longer than you or me ever will, but also shorter than Agni, or the spirits of your tribe. They were still human.”

“Oh, okay. So those sages are written in the stars?”

“Yeah. And they were important for a lot of reasons, and there are a ton of versions of them, and a ton of versions of this myth. They did stuff like define time, and the way we live, besides even the Avatar cycle.”

“What about Agni?”

“That’s the story part of it. These sages were the very beginning of life as we know it, in the world that we know. Agni, however, was a mean god at first. He saw the sages, and he wanted their wives.”

“Their wives? That’s sort of—Zuko,” Katara complains, “I don’t want to hear about romance. Romance is icky.”

“It’s not about romance,” he shifts in the moon’s light, the fire in his palm alight. He seems to have a lot of patience, so unlike his sister. Katara finds herself strangely immersed in his eyes, in the way he seems so passionate about the past. “It’s about love, and loyalty, and having faith.”

“So Agni got the sages to divorce all of their wives, and he married them,” Zuko pronounces solemnly. Katara gasps in surprise, and a frown falls over her features. 

“They didn’t trust their wives at all!”

“Well, most of them. Do you see that star right there?” he points up again, and Katara can see a faint outline, a small spot, next to one of the brighter stars there. “One of the Fire Sages trusted his wife, and now they’re together forever, under the sky.”

He pauses, and Katara crosses her hands over her chest. “Is that the entire story? It’s sort of sad. And anyway,” she asks, “why do you like Agni so much if he got those sages to divorce their wives for no reason?”

“Agni is a god. And he’s known for being passionate, and his fire, and all of that. And he’s what founded the Fire Nation. He rules three realms; the earth as fire, the atmosphere as lightning, and the sky as the sun. He is all knowing, and he’s an example for firebenders. He’s a god of destruction and of growth.”

“But weren’t the dragons the original firebenders?”

“Yeah. But that’s not—Agni is really important in the Fire Nation,” Zuko continues. “We have these duels, too, called Agni Kais. They’re when two people fight with fire until one is humiliated or dead.”

“Why would you do that?” Katara asks, aghast. “It doesn’t make any sense—”

“It’s the dual nature of firebending. When you have fire, sometimes you kill things. But fire is also integral to life. And someone wins an Agni Kai, but someone loses. Fire is the most destructive element, so firebenders have to keep themselves in check.”

The wind rushes over Katara’s face, and she turns further into his heat. Suddenly, the fire in his palm feels comforting, because she understands what he meant about meditation. “So you meditate . . . to not be like Agni?”

“This got . . . I didn’t mean to get that deep,” he blushes. “I just wanted to tell you the story about the seventh sage and his wife. She’s really not just his wife, that’s unfair, she’s almost like . . . an eighth sage, and a star-woman. But their story is nice.”

“It’s a romance,” she teases. 

“It’s not a—okay, _fine,”_ Zuko grumbles. “It’s a little bit of a romance. But it’s about loyalty and love.”

Katara kind of wants to comment on how she can _see_ him blushing, but she wants to hear the rest of this, so she lets it go after she takes in Azula playing with fire in her palms again at the back. The motion disturbs her senses and almost makes her want to yawn, and so she does. Zuko’s flame goes out, and she immediately shivers in the cold. “You should go back if you’re tired.”

“I’m a waterbender,” she tells him. “I don’t get tired.” It’s a nonsensical excuse, and she sees Zuko pull his hand to his mouth to hide a tiny yawn too, but he continues the story. 

“The star-woman was very wise, maybe even more so than the sages, but the world was a little—misogyn-gynistic back then—”

“What does that mean?”

“People thought women weren’t as good as men.”

“That sounds like stuff the Northern Water Tribe does,” Katara raises her chin. “I don’t like that. Everyone is equal.”

“I agree,” Zuko’s mouth twists, “and everyone is equal in the Fire Nation _now._ But yeah, the star-woman was very wise, and when Agni took away the other wives, she befriended the spirits and ensured that she stayed. She tried to save the rest, but she couldn’t, but she tried. And she was just really cool, all around. Once, the rain spirit made it not rain for twelve years, but the star-woman convinced them to make it rain again. She was very powerful, and a super strong woman, even in the old world.”

“That star,” Katara points out again, pressing her fingers against the sky. Her vision is getting a bit blurry with sleep, and she doesn’t react much when Zuko quenches the fire in his palm and glances his fingers over hers, directing it to a different place in the sky. His hands are warm, and they feel nice, and she _maybe_ clutches onto his fingers for a second before he pulls away. A small blush rises to her cheeks, and they both scoot a bit away from each other. 

“That’s nice,” she ends up saying. “It’s a nice story, and I’m glad the star-woman and the seventh sage were able to stay together.”

“My mom likes it,” Zuko shrugs a little. “She says that it’s about loyalty from everyone. The seventh sage wasn’t deceived, and the star-woman was powerful in herself. She always tells me not to fall for lies.”

“There’s one thing I don’t get. Why do the Fire Sages, the ones now, support Agni? Especially if he took their wives away from them?”

“It’s . . .” Zuko struggles. “I guess they want to help other people contain themselves, and make sure that the Fire Nation royals never do something as bad as Agni. He wasn’t a royal, but he’s kinda like that. My mom says that . . . that it’s not really the same anymore, that sometimes there is corruption and stuff. But they’re good. They’re supposed to do good.”

“Everyone is always trying to do good,” Katara summarizes, “and you should trust the people you love, like the sage and the star-woman trusted each other.”

“Yeah.”

“I like that story,” she yawns again. “I like your stories, Zuko. I think that you like telling them, and that makes them fun to listen to.”

“No, it was sort of a mess, and I’m sorry—”

“Katara!” Sokka yells, and she turns around to see him standing up, his features tense. He doesn’t look like he’s crying, but he looks very, severely sad, and Azula is next to him with her face perplexed. “Let’s go home. These people are mean.”

_Zuko isn’t that mean,_ she thinks, but he looks like a mess, so she grasps Zuko’s still warm hand in a burst of confidence and whispers in his ear. “I’ll tell you my stories, too. And don’t worry, you’re not a mess.”

“I—”

“We are never, ever coming back here,” Sokka stalks forward and grabs her from the blanket. Katara reacts in a burst of emotion, and a tentacle of water rises from the ocean and slaps Sokka on the arm. He lets go of her with a yell of complaint. “We have to go back home. And we are not coming back here. Ever. Again.”

Zuko looks at her, confused, and she gives him her nicest smile. Her eyes drift to the moon, and his do too, and he nods at her. She’s lost for a few seconds before she realizes what he’s trying to tell her. 

She might not find a friend in Azula, but maybe she will in this strange Fire Nation boy. _Have faith, fire is good and evil, everyone is trying to do good—_

She thinks that she’ll be able to learn a lot from him. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, this tale is inspired by Hindu mythology, in which Agni is the god of fire. It's definitely changed a lot to fit into this timeframe, and not at all very accurate to the myths it's derived from. 
> 
> The stars they are looking at are known as the Big Dipper in the West. The asterism consists of seven stars, representing seven rishis, the Saptarshi, called 'Fire Sages' here. There is a star slightly below the constellation, belonging to the wife of the seventh sage--these are Arundhati and Vashistha. They form the Mizar double together. 
> 
> This link contains a lot of information on several Hindu myths, including that of the Saptarshi and Agni. Here's the article's phrasing:
> 
> _" Agni developed a desire for the [rishis'] wives and wanted to seduce them. On the other hand, a minor goddess or a nymph (depending on who you ask) wanted to marry Agni. She therefore took the form of six of the seven wives of the Saptarshi’s and mated with Agni. However, the Saptarshi’s themselves, uncertain about the chastity of their wives, divorced them and they went on to become the Kritika or Pleiades. Only one wife, Arundhati of Vasishtha, remained loyal to her husband. That is the binary in Ursa Major."_
> 
> Arundhati is the star-woman Zuko states, and was a force to be reckoned with. You can read about the legendary love of these two further [here.](https://histonerd.com/learning-from-stars-arundhati-vashishtha/%E2%80%9D%20>here.</a%20>%20All%20of%20these%20legends%20are%20chock-full%20of%20interpretation.%20I%20choose%20to%20believe%20that%20Arundhati%20and%20Vasishtha,%20a%20couple%20of%20stars%20who%20were%20equal%20in%20their%20revolution,%20is%20a%20story%20about%20equality%20in%20itself.%20%0A%0AA%20lot%20of%20stuff%20about%20Agni%20was%20made%20up,%20although%20it's%20common%20in%20ATLA%20fanon.%20Read%20more%20about%20him%20<a%20href=) The moral lessons and idea of control and fire is made up by me, although Agni as a god was certainly known to have his ups and downs. 
> 
> Let me know what you thought! Thank you for supporting this story--I'm trying to mesh some of the real world and ATLA together to my own interpretation, which can be testy, but my ultimate goal is to create a narrative about moral growth. This is one of just a few chapters that will be myth-based, and it's personally very important to me, aha. ATLA fanon includes a lot of cultural influence, as does the show, and I think that's one reason it's so appealing. That said, the original ATLA took a lot from Hinduism without really giving the religion much actual representation in the show. There were a lot of creative ways I think they could have incorporated tales into the narrative without demeaning all of its existing cultural influences.
> 
> Sorry for this long AN! Thank you for reading, and happy Nano!


	5. Heart

**The Twenty-Eight Mansions** **  
** **_Azure Dragon of the East_ ** **_  
_ **

##  _Xīn, ‘Heart’_

"If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow." (Chinese Proverb)

* * *

  
  


The next day Hakoda and Kya have to go to the nations’ summit—it’s a fancy meeting in a fancy home, hosted by the Earth Kingdom delegation, and they’re dragged along because their parents don’t trust them alone in the house. It’s a valid fear—Sokka accidentally throws his boomerang through a window when he wakes up in the morning, screaming that the sun is blue and going to eat him.

Katara isn’t sure _if_ she wants to know what exactly went down between him and Azula last night. Sokka, however, had interrogated her about her conversation with Zuko in rapid whispers as they’d slunk back into bed. She’d dodged his accusations and told him that they’d just been discussing the constellations. Sokka had seemed suspended in disbelief at that, at first, but then she’d started rambling about meditation, and firebending, and he’d stopped paying attention to her. 

Katara wants to protest going to the summit with her parents—staying home seems like it would be much more fun—but Hakoda loosely quips about how there will be plenty of other kids there, and Sokka’s eyes light up, and she knows this is a lost cause. He is, for some reason, still infatuated with the girl he’d seen _once—_ that’s just how Sokka _is._ It’s annoying. She knows her parents, and also knows that love needs to be a _lot_ deeper than thinking someone is cute. 

The family decides to walk across the island, taking their time to get to the talks. The path they take is paved well and lined with lanterns, and they pass several beaches and stands on the way. Ember Island is really more of a vacation place than anything else, and the nations have been meeting here for something like sixty years _._ The heads and influences of each society get to have fun while they make diplomatic discussions, and hanging out at the beach manages to keep some discussions informal. 

Sokka jumps around as they walk, and his eyes widen like saucers when they reach an open-air market. The wares it has consist of silver spoons to daggers and cotton clothing and komodo-chicken. His eyes flit between the swords and meat like he can’t quite decide what entices him more, and before he can decide Kya drags him away, a smile lilting on her lips. 

The house they reach is different from the one they are placed in, more of a hall, and Hakoda grabs Katara’s hand before introducing them all to the delegates at the door. They are all dressed in very water tribe clothing today, light blue fabric, and jewelry glints on their necks and wrists. One woman trades quick words with him before taking the two of them by the sleeves and whisking them off. Katara whimpers and clutches onto her father’s sleeves before she’s gone, slightly terrified. 

Hakoda calls out in the background, unaffected, “Have fun!”

Katara grunts and grabs Sokka’s hand. His fingers are loose and sweaty in her own, but they’re comfortable. The woman leads them to a room in the corner and drops them off, hustling away. 

Sokka almost walks into the door, but Katara stops him with a frown, shuddering. “Uh. This room doesn’t have a door—”

Suddenly, a slit opens in the door’s sedimented middle, and Katara lets out a little scream when she sees a face look out at them through it. It’s a girl who looks awfully tiny, likely younger than her, with milky eyes and hair in front of her face. Sokka draws out boomerang, trying to act somewhat tough. Then the girl blows hair out of her face and deadpans. “And who are _you?”_

“I’m Sokka. This is Katara,” he says. “We’re from . . . the Southern Water Tribe?”

“How old are you?”

“Um—ten and eleven.”

“Kids,” the girl confirms, her head bouncing. She steps away and the hole in the door closes again; then something _cracks_ and the entire door splits off to the side, until there’s a _hole in the wall._

Sokka and Katara jump back, hold each other, and gasp. Dust falls from the ceiling, and the girl stands barefoot across from them, tapping her foot against the ground with her head tilted. There are a few kids behind her, shapes they can’t really make out in the cloud. 

After half a minute of them standing straight, she points out a finger to the side of them and smirks. “Come in, stupids. Don’t want the adults to figure us out?”

They still don’t move, but then the ground erupts from beneath them, moving them forward. Sokka pulls Katara protectively into his arms until they’re _thrown_ into the cavernous room. There’s a _thud_ to be heard as the room closes behind them. 

They get up in the aftermath, and Katara looks around with a gasp. There are quite a few people here: the other three kids she recalls from the first day at the beach, Azula and—and Zuko in the corner, and a few weary old teenagers at the side. Her head swivels again when the loud girl, the _earthbender,_ coughs at her. She can notice, now, that the girl is completely barefoot—she looks somewhere between unkempt and composed, as if she’d attempted to get ready and then decided to jump through sand moments later. 

“I’m Toph,” she points a finger out to the ceiling. “And I’m the greatest earthbender in the world!”

“Yeah, yeah, we _get it,”_ Azula drawls from the corner. She’s next to Mai, who’s ignoring Ty Lee doing handstands and staring out into the distance. Zuko and Chan are across from them, both looking completely disenchanted with each other. “You’re amazing.”

An assorted variety of other children reign the room, dressed in Earth Kingdom greens and Fire Nation reds. Katara thinks there’s a distinctive lack of Southern Water Tribe blue and Air Nomad orange (to be expected), and is slightly put to peace when she sees a small girl and boy talking with their hands at the side, dressed in purple. There are no more than fifteen children, but only Toph looks excited. 

“Oh, is the Sparky Princess getting gloomy that someone is _better_ than her?” Toph bites, and Azula gets up from her chair, dusting her hands off, a small, diabolical light coming to her eye. Mai’s vision veers sideways, and Ty Lee lands on her feet with a frown. 

Sokka shudders next to Katara, and she turns around to see her brother staring at the acrobat with hearts in his eyes. She nudges him forward with his shoulder, and he slowly starts circumnavigating the room to avoid the confrontation that’s about to take place. 

“No fighting!” one of the elder Earth Kingdom girls yells at Azula and Toph, but they don’t pay her any heed, and she sighs back into a lying position. Katara skeets to the side and looks on with interest. 

Azula’s hands burn blue, and Toph steps onto the ground until it lightly rumbles. Katara almost falls down, saved by a warm hand wrapping around her arm and pulling her close to the green curtained wall. For a second she thinks it might be Zuko, but his hands are hotter than that. When she opens her eyes to see her savior, it’s Chan, the Fire Nation boy from the first day that Sokka didn’t really like. He and another boy are facing Zuko, who’s wearing a scowl, though it doesn’t seem to be directed at her. 

Chan doesn’t let her go—he bends her sideways until she’s sort of lying in his arms, and she can’t help the blush that rises to her cheeks in this position. Then he moves her back up, placing his arms on her shoulders to ensure that she’s upright. 

Across the room, she can see Sokka and Ty Lee involved in some sort of conversation, smiles alight on their faces while Mai picks at her nails with— _are those needles?_ Toph and Azula are yelling at each other in the middle of the room. 

“Katara, right?” Chan asks, his face twisted in a mockery of a suave smile. “I guess I _caught_ you—”

She pushes his hand off her shoulder and turns to watch the confrontation. “I’m a prodigy!”

“Yeah, but you’re not special! I’m the greatest earthbender in the world! I learned from the badgermoles!”

“I’m going to learn from the dragons!”

“Still doesn’t mean you’re good enough, Sparky Princess.” Katara almost giggles at the term, because it’s scarily accurate. “We can put this to the test.”

The guy next to her smiles roughly. “I’m Ruon-Jian! And this is Zuko—”

“I know,” she shifts until she’s facing them, next to Zuko, where she feels somewhat more comfortable. Her anxiety grows when she feels Toph’s hair fly in front of her face, and the ground rumbles once again. Azula’s eyes glow blue, and she suddenly reaches out to tug on Zuko’s loose sleeves. He startles at the contact and stares at her. 

“Azula is going to hurt her,” she says plaintively. “She doesn’t have control.”

“You know her?” Chan frowns and glares at Zuko, and then Katara’s hand on his arm. Blushing again, she pulls away. Zuko sighs loudly and then stomps into the middle of the room, reaching out to grab Azula’s shirt. She startles at him and blasts out a small burst of blue fire that he dodges. 

The light, however, brings all attention to the middle of the room. Sokka and Ty Lee and Mai shift their attention to the three others, and one of the teenager earthbenders stands with his fingers bent. 

“Zuzu!” Azula complains. Zuko tugs on her, looking more fed up than scared that his sister could have just burned him to a crisp. “She’s being mean!”

“Mom wouldn’t like this!”

“Aha! Momma’s boy,” Toph teases, and Azula turns back, her eyes glowing. 

“Take that back!”

“Aw, what happened? Are the two Sparklers gonna work together?”

Azula crosses her hands over her chest. “Nobody gets to make fun of Zuko but me!”

Katara doesn’t like her, but she sort of gets the sentiment. Azula’s hands flare up again, and Zuko pulls her to the side. The earthbender guy creates a wall between the two girls, and the ground shakes again. When it’s completed, the room is in two. Katara and Chan are standing next to Zuko and Azula, the other water tribe kids looking unaffected in the background. 

“Zuko! She was being mean—”

“No meaner than you usually are.”

Azula opens her mouth and then closes it like a fish. Katara moves away from Chan’s hand on her shoulder—he’s almost trying to be _comforting—_ and returns the awkward smile Zuko sends her from across the room. 


	6. Tail

**The Twenty-Eight Mansions** **  
****_Azure Dragon of the East_ ** **_  
_**

##  _Wĕi, ‘Tail’_

“Even the strongest the eagle cannot soar higher than the stars." (Inuit Proverb)

* * *

  
  


The night after Azula’s fight with the little earthbender, Zuko and Katara meet at night again. He brings his blanket, and she brings a story this time. 

She tells him of the ocean spirit who rocks the sea near her house, and she describes the spirits of the hunt to him. The water tribes know the spirits the best of all the nations—there is understanding in the depth of the poles, elders who can communicate to the world beyond. When Avatar Aang dies, the next Avatar will be one of them. She tells him of La, the spirit of the water, and how she gives them life, and energy, and how she and Tui work together to create the moon. 

“I have stories about the stars,” Zuko tells her solemnly. “You have them about everything else.”

Katara sneaks out alone, and she doesn’t tell Sokka that she goes—as far as he knows, she is outside, but simply bending across the water. Their part of the island is cut-off, alone, and guarded in the distance. They are both parts of important delegations. 

Sokka, for whatever reason, is incensed at Azula—the other girl, according to Zuko, lost interest in meeting the water tribe siblings when she learned the boy would not be there. So they meet alone, spend hours talking, and then adjourn. Katara wants to feel finality in those moments, but she doesn’t. 

“Stars,” she whispers to him, on the second day, “are the eyes of all the spirits. They are always watching us.”

Zuko is not the loudest boy, definitely in juxtaposition to his sister. Her words, however, make him close up. She reaches out across the blanket, shivering once again in the night’s wind, and lays her palm over his fists. “What happened?”

“Nothing, I—I just get scared by that. I have a lot of pressure on me to do good, you know. To be a good son, and all of that—I don’t need the spirits’ pressure—”

“You try to be a good person, Zuko. Good people are always rewarded.”

“Are they?”

“Yeah.”

He doesn’t remove her fingers from his, that night, simply heats up his palm to keep her warm, so her shivers eventually subside. They don’t say anything, but the next day she goes back to the alcove anyway. She tells herself that she’s going to practice her bending under a moon on the verge of filling, but she stumbles upon him in luck and hope. 

Zuko is at the fire-pit Azula had used the first night, wood under his arms that he had dragged there. He is trying to place it into some kind of circle, and Katara runs to help him. When she presses her hand against his side, a quiet hello, he doesn’t flinch or react, simply turns to her with his lips . . . not elevated, but not apathetic. Katara has helped the shamans of the village many times, and always aids with the fire, so she knows how to set it up, creating a triangular shape. 

“You know your way around fire,” Zuko mumbles as he draws her back by the shoulder and launches his hands towards the pile. Katara watches as the pile goes up in bright red fire. 

“I don’t get why you don’t think you’re a good bender. Look!”

“It’s orange,” he sighs. “Sometimes red, when I feel . . . when I feel at peace,” he whispers. “But you’ve seen Azula’s. She’s a prodigy, and her fire is blue because of her focus. She’s good at staying focused—”

“But that doesn’t make you a good firebender. It’s one part of it, but your intentions are always good. She’s not nice to you,” she frowns, “but I think she’s the nicest Azula gets.”

“Yeah,” he laughs lowly, turned away from her. She sees their blanket rolled up in the corner and tugs it out, trying to avoid getting grainy sand particles on the top. Katara pushes the blanket near to the fire before she rests on it, sighing into the warmth of the moment. Zuko doesn’t join her, and she looks up to see him giving her a deep, introspective look. She humors him for a minute before his gaze gets mildly creepy and she hits the blanket, causing the ground to casually shift beneath them. 

“Come on.”

His eyes trace hers for a moment before he slowly flops down onto the blanket, silently. Katara supposes she can do the talking. “Do you like coming here?”

“To Ember Island?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess . . . yeah. I think I’ve been coming here forever. And I probably will come here forever.”

“Oh?” Katara shifts to her side. The bright moon tonight illuminates the pale sheen of his face. “Where do you usually live?”

“No super far away,” he pauses like he’s going to mention something else, then continues after a brief stutter. “Caldera City.”

“Oh. You’re like a big noble, right?”

“I guess,” he sighs. “And you’re the chief’s daughter.”

“Yup!” Katara crawls nearer to the heat, but the moon is doing strange things to her body; she feels alight and yet terribly, weightlessly cold. The blood in her own veins sings, and she shifts. Zuko notices, and even though he looks sort of dreamy—out of place—he reaches for her and wraps his hands around hers. Katara shudders at the warmth, which feels all too good, and suddenly she’s right next to him, his beating heart against her. 

She’s like this with Sokka all the time. It’s a sort of hug, and it’s familiar—but Zuko’s heat reminds her that he isn’t Sokka, and she suddenly wants to pull away, because she shouldn’t hug random nice guys she tells stories about the stars with on her vacation house’s beach. But his hands don’t move, and he doesn’t pull away, so she sits in the silence with him. 

Wind blows across her down-angled face, leaving her hair in front of her eyes, and she attempts to huff upwards and blow it away. An eastern wind, draconic breath, flits across her eyelashes, and she looks up to see Zuko smiling softly at her. His face shifts back to normal a moment later, and they awkwardly look away, but they don’t move. 

“You’re warm,” she finally lets slip awkwardly. 

“I’m a firebender. We’re usually warm.”

Half an hour later, they get up and put out the fire. Zuko lights Katara’s way back to her house, and she slips through smoking foliage before waving him goodbye. In the morning, Kya asks why several leaves on the tree at their house’s side are burned off—Sokka, luckily, isn’t bright enough to explain, or come to a conclusion of his own. 

She slips out the next night, too. It is his turn to tell her about the Azure Dragon of the East. “Blue,” he tells her. “He’s blue, like you. He’s pacifying, and calming, and he knows about bending in peace.”

“Nonbenders in the Fire Nation must not have a lot to work with,” she teases, and he looks distraught. 

“I guess they look at the stars differently. It must be weird, being a nonbender.”

“I’m the only bender in my family.”

“My mom’s not a bender, but she was descended from Avatar Roku.” He looks at her with a strange sort of pity on his face. “Does that get lonely?”

“Sometimes,” she says, and ends the conversation there. The firewood in the pit goes out, and Zuko clothes her fingers with his again. She pulls close, because he is familiar, and for some reason she thinks he understands her kind of loneliness. 

It is a night well after that, perhaps a week or two later, while they lay crawled up beneath the stars, comfortable with each other, that Zuko asks her a new question. “Are we friends?”

“Of course!”

“Really?”

“What does that mean? Of course, _really._ And you have Chan and Ruon-Jian and—”

“They’re not really my friends. Not like you.”

Katara stares him in his gold, pooling, reflection and _innocent_ eyes, and smirks. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily!”

The nights over those weeks that they churn into their own—not exactly hidden, not approved but not unallowed—are what constitute her childhood. Eight-year-old Katara knows, then, that she will remember them all vividly; every story told, every awkward, friendly hug. 

Perhaps she could be a star-woman. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This is the Canadian First People's website](https://firstpeoplesofcanada.com/fp_groups/fp_inuit5.html). Most of Katara's stories are made up of items from ATLA-verse and open wiki. 
> 
> [The Azure Dragon of the East ](https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2017/05/awakening-ancient-dragons/)"has a reputation associated with protection; in literature, this dragon has been reincarnated as several famous war heroes. The Azure Dragon is also associated with spring and the element, wood." 
> 
> Thank you for reading! <3


	7. Winnowing Basket

**The Twenty-Eight Mansions** **  
****_Azure Dragon of the East_ ** **_  
_**

##  _Jī, ‘Winnowing Basket’_

“Love without friendship is like a shadow without the sun.” (Japanese Proverb)

* * *

  
  
  


She leaves a month later, and they are supposed to meet at the beach one final, last time— 

They don’t. Life gets in the way, small things, and instead they are dragged to a long-lasting formal dinner. The lucky part of that is that Katara and her mother host it, and Zuko and Azula come. The problem with that is that the other delegates’ children come too—shy Yue of the Northern Water Tribe is no problem, but Toph is a nightmare, and she has latched onto Sokka, like Azula and Yue do as well. Katara simply does not understand why her lanky, awkward brother makes girls flock to him in droves—even a girl as sweet and nice as Yue. He is still starstruck by Ty Lee, who they rarely get to see. 

Although Toph is annoying, the girls obsessing over her brother create interesting drama and a spectacle for Katara to watch as she eats dinner. The food is generically good, water tribe with a hint of a new, interesting spice. Fire Nation chilis bit at her lips for a few days, but now she can almost like their taste. 

Then dinner finishes and the adults laugh around shark teeth, and the kids leave. Katara hides behind the hall’s curtains as Toph skips to the other side of the house, and then slips into her room. Second later, she hears footsteps and smiles as Zuko sinks into her room, his hands toying with the strands of hair at the nape of his neck. 

Katara lies back into her bed, staring at its blue duvet, and Zuko stands, awkwardly. After a few seconds, she gestures for him to come closer. He walks forward hesitantly, and when she gets _sick_ of him she draws him close to her and pulls him onto the bed with all the strength in her small body. He falls more out of surprise than her. 

He breathes heavily, then, but doesn’t pull away. He’s pressed close to her, his side to her, and Katara suddenly feels like this is too different, an _unknown—_ and so she quickly jumps off the bed and opens her window, letting the moon’s soft rays bleed into them. This time, she grabs his arm and lightly snuggles into him as the sky pushes light onto them. Zuko almost looks like he has a halo, spread up against her bedsheets. She finds it strange that his skin is paler than hers, and yet his hair is darker. She could almost call him beautiful. 

She doesn’t, though. His warm hands lay against her side and she whispers to him, after a moment. “I’m going to miss you.”

“You’ll be back next year, right?”

“Of course,” she smiles at him with all the joy she can muster. “We can write a little, too.”

His response is to pull her closer the tiniest bit. Katara has started to learn that although Zuko is loath to admit it, he loves touch and warmth. They have grown abnormally close in the course of weeks, and that’s because they understand each other. She can give him what he needs, and he can listen to her and understand her. It was that loneliness, but now it’s even more than that—now it’s understanding which seeps into her bones. 

“I almost forgot,” he speaks after a minute, and pulls a scroll out of his pants. It’s a little worse for wear, but Katara grabs it instantly, marveling at the light paper so unlike the way her people write their stories—it would not fare well in the moist air of the south. “It’s a bunch of stories that I wrote down. They’re not super accurate to the stuff from the Fire Nation because I was thinking about what you said and I sort of—”

“Zuko,” Katara breathes out. “Did you write me a story?”

A blush rises to his cheeks in front of her, and he looks away. “No. I wrote you three.”

She leans up and hugs him tightly, and of course that’s when Kya walks in. There isn’t anything such as privacy in the South Pole, because privacy is hard to maintain when you sleep together to maintain body heat and—and they don’t have rules about space in their household. 

Zuko sees her at the door and immediately lurches away from Katara, pulling her arms off of him and unsteadily landing on his feet, bowing at Kya. “Miss—”

“Katara,” Kya raises her eyebrows at her blushing daughter on the bed, and then at the boy lying in front of her. Both of their cheeks are colored. “So this is who you’ve been spending time with?”

“His name is Zuko,” Katara says proudly, as if she’s talking about a new pet she’s bought. Zuko looks up at her, sort of disgruntled. “He’s super nice.”

“Nicer than . . .” Kya whispers under her breath before smiling at the boy. “You can get up . . . Zuko. A friend of my daughter is a friend of mine. A friend . . .”

“A friend, Mom!” 

“I’m sure, I’m sure,” she laughs. But then she gestures for them to follow her out the door. “Unfortunately, though, it’s time to go. You two should . . . say your goodbyes.”

Katara inclines her head at her mother, silently pleading with her to leave, but Kya stays solid, shaped against the door. Katara slides off the bed and next to Zuko, giving her mother another pointed look. Kya doesn’t move, and Katara sighs and hugs Zuko tightly, feeling his warmth around her. He shivers for a second in her grasp, leaning over to whisper in her ear. “This doesn’t feel very honorable.”

She responds to that by clutching him closer and kissing his cheek in full view of her mother. It’s awkward, just a peck, but it makes his body temperature skyrocket, and he awkwardly angles himself and does the same to her where her mom can’t see. His lips are chapped and awkward against her skin, but that doesn’t matter. 

Kya opens herself up to let Zuko let himself out the window, and then turns around to walk inside. She winks at Katara, and reaches for the scroll on her blue covers. “What’s this? A love letter?”

“It’s not like that!”

“Okay, okay,” Kya teases. “He seems like a nice boy.”

“He’s . . . _Mom!”_

(He is.)


	8. Interlude I

###  _INTERLUDE I:_

******_  
_** ****

## The Two Years In-Between 

## The Drum of the Fire Prince

Zuko and Katara do not write. Katara isn’t good at writing, and she’s too scared to ask her mother to send a letter—he doesn’t reach out to her, either, and after half a year passes she decides that this is simply how they will be. In her mind he is still her best friend, and even if they don’t talk for a year . . . she can believe in that fantasy until they meet again. 

She finds faith and peace in the scroll tied up against her body. The South Pole is moist, the air is wet, and scrolls do not do well here—but Katara convinces her father to lend her a little trunk, made of metal and wood from the other nations. She places it in there and takes it out, savoring every word done in Zuko’s flowing, calligraphic script. He writes in the tongues all the nations share, and she is able to mostly understand his tales. 

The first story he tells her is about the drum; she looks up at the sky and can see it, three stars wrapping around a larger area. She asks her elders about it, asks her grandmother, and learns that to them it is a story about hunters. _Four hunters went into the sky,_ her grandmother says. _Only one came back and told the story. The other three are frozen in time._

Zuko’s story is less about the stars, and more of what they mean. He says that the stars are like that of the Tsuzumi, the drum he plays. The story he writes is about him. _My father wanted me to learn an instrument, and I have always been good at the Tsungi horn. He wishes that I learn how to play the Tsuzumi. It is something Azula has always been better at. So I’m a disappointment. But I know you’re going to get mad at me and say that this story is sad, so I’ll tell you why it’s good._

He tells her a funny tale that she recalls over and over again, introducing the hilarious character of his uncle—a man he’d talked to her about many times before. He tells her about the time they ran away to play the Tsungi horn on a ship, and he tells her about how much he loves the old man. The first story is peaceful, and it stays with her. She reads it many times. 

“Is that from your boyfriend?” Sokka teases her once, and she blushes and pushes back. Although Zuko ends that story with the words _I’m going to miss you,_ their last spring feels terribly far away. Sometimes she wonders if him and her, their awkward late night stories, that last hug . . . if it was even real. 

“Don’t tease Katara,” Kya chastises her son, and that puts Sokka to the side. He had many more reasons to be teased, and Katara finds plenty of occasions to jab at him about his plentiful failed attempts to romance Ty Lee. The girl is lost in her own world, only dragging along Mai—he has a better chance with _Azula._ That causes him to blanche. 

The year after the first summit is good. Hakoda and Kya strike up a relationship with Toph’s family, even if the little girl is a lot to handle, and suddenly there is a lot more variety in food. Cross-trading in the Fire Nation means that spices leak into their food supply, and Katara is generous with them. The spice on her tongue reminds her of the Fire Nation, and also of . . . him. 

His chapped lips at her cheek always bring a blush to the forefront of her complexion. She gets mad at herself for fantasizing about this, about them. She reads his stories, and his words, and she reminds herself that he is just a friend of hers—one that is so much older, anyway. By the next time they meet, it’s likely that he’ll have realized that she’s just a little girl. He’ll hang out with Ruon-Jian, and Chan, the boys who annoy her and look at her weird, and he won’t want to talk about stories. Stories aren’t _manly,_ Sokka insists one time, and she wants to hit him upside the head. 

But Zuko doesn’t consume all of her thoughts. She mends with her mother and grandmother, but she also gets much, much better at bending. She’s able to create water whips and then turn those into ice. For a time, she has fun practicing making structures out of everything, and the landscape outside is littered with little ice-sculptures. Her mentors, especially Master Hama, look on at her fondly. 

As she boards their boat to Ember Island, that next year, she’s excited—she has a lot to share with Zuko, and a lot to tell him. She only hopes he hasn’t forgotten her. 

## The Water Girl and the Polar Star

_Katara, this story is completely my own. I was thinking about how fire and water are opposite elements, like air and earth. Did you know that the Polar Star is depicted in our star charts? The polar, like you._

_I came up with a story for you. Once upon a time, there was a little girl who played amongst the stars. She was a very powerful waterbender. But then one day she came to the Fire Nation, and she met a Fire Nation boy. She was better than this Fire Nation boy in most ways. She was more powerful, and she was nicer, and everyone wanted to talk to her and be her friend. But she still decided to be his friend._

_The Fire Nation boy felt very sad that he couldn’t give her anything of value, like she could give him. Because she did give him the most powerful thing of all; friendship. So he summoned the spirits and asked them to give him the Polar Star so that he could give it to her. But the spirits said that he couldn’t, because the entire star map would break without the powerful waterbender. So it’s very important that the waterbender stay in the firebender’s life, because she’s the center of everything._

Whenever Katara wants to feel warm, she rereads Zuko’s second story. She has it clutched in her hand as they pull back up to Ember Island after a year away. She doesn’t feel much different at all, and the humidity hits her in the face. Perhaps she’s a few inches taller—perhaps. 

Zuko and Azula, of course, aren’t waiting for them when they arrive—but Katara and Sokka run down to the beach immediately after they get settled in again. Katara debates taking the stories with her, but decides not to. For a second, she shudders, because she’s fearful that Zuko forgot her . . . then she rereads one of his lines. _He could give it to her._ He wanted to give her a star. 

Katara takes in a deep breath and sprints down to the beach with Sokka, careful to put on shoes and not scald her feet. When they get there, the beach is empty. Sokka seems more distraught than Katara on the surface, but she feels pulled aside from the inside out, and very, very betrayed that Zuko isn’t there. He must have forgotten her. 

She runs back to her home and cries into her bed covers, well into the night. Kya and then Hakoda come in to shift her, bringing her water and dinner. She bends the glass onto the floor angrily, but her parents don’t interfere with her tantrum. They let her close her room and sob into her pillow, her hand clutching a thin piece of paper underneath the silk. 

Then, as the moon hits the sky, she hears a small rap at the window. She looks outside and gasps, a small smile—or something of the sort—falling onto her face. “Zuko!”

She runs over and opens the window, and the little boy sulks inside, sitting on the floor. They don’t hug, because they’re old now, not just _kids,_ and that would be weird. “Hi,” he says. “Sorry I wasn’t on the beach earlier. My . . . dad wanted to have a family meeting.”

Zuko looks sad about that, so Katara plops down and gives him a big smile. “You have to tell me everything you’ve been doing.”

“You first,” he replies, and then blushes and looks down. “Did you read my stories?”

“I read them a million times!” she jumps over to her bed and pulls out the scroll, worn with multiple readings, and reverently hands it back to him. Zuko caresses the fabric and then smiles at her, handing it back. “I loved them!”

“I’m glad. I would have written, but I didn’t—”

“It’s fine,” Katara smiles. “We’re good, right?”

“Yeah, we’re good.” He smiles. 

Unfortunately, this year’s trip to Ember Island is cut short on Zuko’s part—he has to go back to the Caldera not even a week after Katara arrives, because his grandfather is sick. Sokka is very happy that means Azula will be leaving, and Ty Lee and Mai will be staying behind—Katara pouts about it. “Relax,” Sokka tells her. “You can meet your boyfriend next year.”

“That’s a long time!” she cries and falls back onto the bed. 

They don’t make promises to write, because they might not be able to. But this year Katara tells Zuko more stories than he told her. She exaggerates the tale of the hunters in the sky, and they laugh about how the men couldn’t navigate a sky-drum. Four of those days, they go outside to the fire pit. They only snuggle together once, because they’re old. Snuggling is bad. 

One day, Zuko finds a shell on the shore. He gives it to her at night, and Katara thinks it’s kind of odd, but she places it in her trunk anyway. She tries to give him an ice-sculpture, but it melts, so instead she supplies him with a rounded piece of sea glass, green and mottled from the ocean. He holds it close to his chest. 

It feels the same as last time, but also deeper—Katara has plenty of friends in the South Pole, now, but Zuko is different. They don’t kiss when they leave this time, just hug in private before he goes. 

Seven days is all too little time with the boy she’s been missing for a year, but at least she got some time with him, and was able to affirm that he was true—that their friendship isn’t imaginary. In Zuko’s absence, she becomes friends with Yue, the shy and sheltered princess of the Northern Water Tribe. They have a monarchy, unlike the Southern Water Tribe, and Yue is very educated. Katara doesn’t even try to tell stories with her, though. It doesn’t compare. 

All she can think about when she leaves is coming back.

## The Friendship of the Sun and the Moon

_I wrote a story about Agni and Tui becoming friends._

Zuko indeed did, and it was hilaritive and imaginative, and that story makes Katara crack up more than once as she reads it in the light of the communal fire. One day, in the middle of winter, she remarks to Kanna. “We should have firebenders here. That way making the fire would be easier.”

“Oh,” Kanna winks at her as she stirs a pot. “I have heard about your firebender boy, Katara.”

“What?”

“Your mother talked to me about it,” she chortles. “So that is your new friend? Is he the one you told about the hunters?”

“What if he is?” Katara questions, staring at the seal meat in her hands. Kanna shrugs. 

“So nothing. It’s just an interesting friendship to have. Is he truly a nice boy?”

“He’s nicer than Sokka,” she admits. “And he always makes sure the fire is hot. I never freeze around him.”

“You might as well marry him,” she jokes. “That’s enough of a reason.”

“Why did you marry Granpakku?”

Kanna stops to think for a minute, and then teases. “He kept me warm!”

“Gran-gran!”

Agni is a hot-headed bender, and Tui is a nicer spirit. Zuko’s version of Tui is personified as a waterbender who constantly threatens to drown Agni when he does stupid things. It’s completely made-up and fantastical, but it makes Katara’s toes feel warm. 

That year is not as good as the first year. The winter is harsh, and so is hunting. The trade treaties help make sure that everyone has enough to eat, but enough is not always a lot, and Katara is a proud chief’s daughter. She spends time helping those who need it, and rebuilds ice mounds and walls during the night’s strong winds. A lot of people get sick, lost to a sweltering sickness. Still, she has her family—she has the sky—she can take on the world. 

Everything changes the next time they visit Ember Island—the air is plagued with the bitterness of winter, and Katara doesn’t know how to hold on to _anything_ anymore. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Tsuzumi in Japan, a ](http://jsnw.org.uk/blog/2007/06/orion-hunter.html)constellation known as Orion in the West. Most of that tale was inspired. 
> 
> [ The Inuit sky (Canada's Eastern Arctic)](https://astro-canada.ca/le_ciel_des_inuits-the_inuit_sky-eng) and the story of the hunters in the sky. "Four men were hunting a bear. The bear escaped by climbing into the sky and the hunters decided to follow it. As they climbed higher and higher, one of the Inuit lost a mitten and decided to return to Earth to fetch it. The other hunters continued their hunt in the sky and we can still see them today climbing after the bear in single file. The legend goes on to say that it was the Inuit hunter who returned to Earth to find his mitten who told the story." This site is super cool! 
> 
> [ The Polar Star](https://www.crystalinks.com/japanastronomy.html) in the middle of the Japanese map! This pic (from the website linked) is amazing:
> 
> Story three was Zuko writing fanfiction. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! I love you all <3


	9. Southern Dipper

**The Twenty-Eight Mansions** **  
** **_Black Tortoise of the North_ ** **_  
_ **

##  _Dŏu, ‘Southern Dipper’_

“The distance between heaven and earth is no greater than one thought.” (Mongolian Proverb)

* * *

  
  


Zuko loves Ember Island. 

He hates the Caldera—he hates the stiffness of court, the rules he’s forced to follow, and the fact that he _can’t run away—_ in the Caldera he’s Prince Zuko, and even though he’s something like fourth in line for the throne, there is a never ending list of etiquette rules he breaks that Azula never does. The palace is stifling, and he has maids and rarely is able to sneak out, and Uncle is never even home anymore because he’s off at the fronts, and that makes his father happy, and . . .

And last year his grandfather had almost died—almost, not quite—and his father had almost seemed _happy_ about that. 

Zuko doesn’t want to dwell on that, though. He’s just angry that last year Ember Island was cut short, and that meant he had to spend an extra week in his stupid palace, where he’s constantly reminded that he will never be as good as Azula. She isn’t terribly in his face about it, but the comparisons Father makes always rankle. 

All he ever wanted was to be good enough for his father—that changed on Ember Island. 

(That’s a lie; Katara changed him on Ember Island.)

Zuko doesn’t really know what it is about the Chief of the Southern Water Tribe’s daughter that calls him most . . . her extraversion, her straightforwardness, the fact that she _trusts_ him? That she seems to _like him—_

He’s spent maybe two months combined in his life with Katara, and those were the two months he felt the most wanted, the most _needed._ He’s a terrible firebender, but he can keep Katara warm; he’s a failure at his studies, but he can still tell the stories he likes to read to Katara. He would write to her, he would, but Father knows _everything,_ and he doesn’t think Mom would be able to hide letters to the ‘dirty water tribes’ from him. 

Around Katara, he’s more than the stupid prince of the Fire Nation, unworthy, especially compared to Lu Ten and Azula. Firstly, Katara doesn’t seem to really know—or perhaps _understand—_ that he’s royalty. She has never treated him different than any of the others she sees, and she has never called him Prince Zuko. Perhaps that’s a lack of formality, but it makes him feel good—he enjoys that she doesn’t seem to know. Because if she doesn’t know who he is . . . that means she likes him for him, just him. 

Zuko has spent his entire life traveling to Ember Island, and his fourteenth time, in his fourteenth year, is just Katara’s third. He’s been reading up in the library at night, without his father knowing, about some water tribe tales. He wants to hear about her, and her life, and how . . . how different it is from his. 

He wants her to talk to him like she likes him, unlike Chan and Ruon-Jian, whose parents have always shoved them to him. He overhears that the Southern Water Tribe delegation will be staying for almost two months this year, and that they will be arriving earlier than normal. The day Katara’s boat arrives, he goes to the beach at night. She doesn’t come to their spot. 

His heart thuds through his chest, but he refuses to think the worst yet—he grabs his blanket and lets the fire he’s lit in the pit wane, and then lights up his hand and traces the way to Katara’s house. He’s been in her room several times before, and he knows that it keeps getting weird, because guys his age aren’t supposed to be alone in rooms with girls, but . . . but this is Ember Island. Everything is different here. 

Her window is open at the bottom, but her room is dark. Zuko decides he’ll go inside anyway, so he wedges his fingers underneath it and moves it up until he can scoot in, dragging the blanket alongside him. He doesn’t make much sound—he’s a worthless son, but there’s one thing he’s good enough at; being invisible when he needs to be. 

Katara isn’t in the room, he thinks, but he can’t really see in the dark, so he lifts up his hand again and shoots a flame through the dark—he’d stopped when he’d walked in, afraid he’d scare her. Nothing moves, but he takes in a lump on the bed, buried in blankets, and he frowns. The house inside is cold. 

He awkwardly moves forward, hoping that Katara and Sokka haven’t exchanged rooms for the night—that would be terrible—and edges away the blanket, sighing in relief when he takes in brown curls and dark skin. He extinguishes the flame until he can see Katara’s head, and exhales lightly into the dark. 

“Katara?”

She’s asleep, and he knows she’s a heavy sleeper—she’d fallen asleep on him once, last year. He doesn’t want to wake her up, but he wants to try a little bit, so he . . . he nudges at her shoulder enough, sparking his fingers again. Then he steps back in shock as her eyes blearily open. 

There are tear tracks running down her face, and her eyes are red and puffy. It’s more than they were last time he’d found her in her room—she looks utterly devastated, as though the world has suddenly stopped spinning. 

“Katara,” he whispers, urgently. “Are you—”

“Zuko?”

“Yeah,” he blushes, though he doesn’t really want to. Katara looks the same, if not a bit older, and she’s sort of cute, but . . . but she’s _crying,_ and that’s not okay. That’s what he’s concentrating on. “What’s wrong?”

She just bursts into tears, and he almost wants to step back—he doesn’t know what to do with _crying_ girls. His mother never cries, Azula never cries . . . well, Ty Lee cries, sometimes, but Mai deals with that. 

“Don’t cry—”

She keeps sobbing as he tries to mutter platitudes to her—when Zuko realizes that he’s completely failing he _almost_ moves back, but Katara grasps his arm. He finds himself helping her up and getting up, himself, onto her bed, until both of their backs are up against the wall. 

Katara isn’t hugging him as much as she’s leaning into him—it’s very familiar, maybe even something she would do with _Sokka,_ and he needs to bite that down, even though he really hopes she doesn’t see him as a brother. Her eyes close again, though she doesn’t seem asleep, and he lets them both settle into that before asking again. “What’s wrong?”

“Zuko,” she chokes out. He waits, but the tears just seem to come faster, so he places his hand around her shoulder and pulls her into him. She pulls at her blankets, and he concentrates himself into warming himself up into some sort of heating pad. He feels some notion of success when she leans into him. “Zuko . . . it’s my mom.”

Zuko doesn’t know Katara’s mother very well, aside from the occasional sighting at dinner—and of course the time they’d kissed in front of her, which still sends shivers up his spines and grates at his sensibilities—but that doesn’t sound good. 

“Is she okay?”

A second of silence, and then a quiet admission into the night. The world does stop spinning during that instance, and he feels like something is crashing down. “She got sick, when we came here.”

“You just got here!”

“On the boat,” she continues. “She got really, really sick on the boat, and she was coughing up blood, and we hurried up and then came here and then called one of the doctors, and it was super—it was super scary, and I don’t know what—what she said, but she left, and she brought a healer from the Northern Water Tribe, and she looked sad—”

“Your mom is sick?” he whispers, all thoughts of warmth and Katara against him gone. How could he have—his mother is all that he thinks he has in the world. He can’t imagine her . . . Katara’s mother isn’t dead. She won’t be—the best healers from every nation are here right now. He voices that, but Katara shakes her head. 

“It doesn’t feel good. I have a bad feeling . . .”

“She’s going to be okay,” Zuko insists, but Katara just turns to him, her damp curls under his chin. All he feels is destroyed. “She’ll be okay, Katara. I promise.”

“Do you . . . I don’t . . . I can’t even help her!”

“It’s . . . the spirits will take care of her.”

Zuko is an emotional boy, but he can’t come up with the words to console Katara right now—he thinks he may not need to. He decides to stop talking and wraps his arm a little tighter around her, and he waits for minutes as her breathing even outs. He needs to leave in a few hours to get back home before the sun rises, before he has to start meditating. Or maybe— 

Katara sleeps next to him, and he centers himself slowly, keeping his arm tight around her. He tries to keep his mind empty, tries to think about the sun and the inner fire within him, thinks about . . . the moon, outside the window, at his side. _I am one with Agni,_ he thinks to himself. 

It works, for a while, but Katara shifts, and her oddly cold breath passes over his neck, and he thinks about her mother and shakes. Kya will be fine—this is the _best_ place to be while sick. She will be fine, and Katara won’t worry, and it will be fine. It _will._

He knows it will, but his heart also sinks deeply, hardened, to the bottom of his chest. Katara is right; there is not a good feeling in the air. It is damp and heavy, and it seems strange, just like everything does . . . he’s worried about her. 

He’s worried about himself, too, quietly. 


	10. Ox

**The Twenty-Eight Mansions** **  
** **_Black Tortoise of the North_ ** **_  
_ **

##  _Niú, ‘Ox’_

“They who give, have all things; they who withhold, have nothing.” (Indian Proverb)

* * *

  
  


Kya does not get better. The sickness is something that the doctor says is unprecedented. Katara whispers that Hakoda got angry and asked if his wife was poisoned, but the answer was no. There is simply a disease in her blood, in her veins, which does not want her to breathe. 

There does not seem to be anything they can do. Zuko knows that Katara has learned the basics of healing, and a little bit of bloodbending, and she cannot help her mother—there are far more experienced healers from the North Pole here. Still, she tells him that she feels so, so angry that blood—nothing more than water—is what is taking her mother from her. 

Because Kya is disappearing. After the first day, the water tribe family tries to go back home. He doesn’t want Katara to leave Ember Island, but he wants her mother to be better. The healers stop them on the way, saying that she should not go, that she would definitively die on the way there. Zuko crawls up to Katara on the beach again, and they do not tell stories. She leans into him on the blanket and sobs into him, quietly. She turns her face right into him, too, in such a way that he thinks she does not want him to acknowledge it—he doesn’t. 

The past two years, he has been lax with his visits to her, and the time he spends with her. He is fourteen now, a teenager, and his father is crueler than he once was. His words bite, and he stays with Azula in the late hours, holds her as even she manages to break down sometimes. His father is getting angrier and angrier at him—ironically, not because he is a weak firebender. He will never be Azula, but he is no longer weak. No, Prince Zuko is weak because he is not upright again; he is too _soft._ He spends too much time with animals, and poetry, and Uncle and Mother and tea. He spends time with his swords and his bending, too, but that goes over his father’s head. 

Prince Ozai is angry at his son. Angrier that he once was, because Zuko has also gotten throatier and more quietly protestful, because Zuko has stopped believing, at all, that his father is a good person. He still wants his father’s love, but he is a mess about it. With the way Ozai is now—still distraught that Fire Lord Azulon did not die the previous summer—he knows that he needs to tread carefully around the man. He does not have room to be caught with a book of stories to tell Katara, or even with his daos. When his father sees him doing anything but firebending, he is chastised. 

Zuko needs to be careful. He knows what his father has done to him and his mother and even his sister in the past; he knows he needs to be careful. But Katara’s eyes draw him in, and he’s willing to take risks for her. Usually, they only meet at midnight. He goes to his firebending lessons on the second day and then skips his tutoring in the early morning. When he reaches her room, she is waking. 

He thinks his mother must see him go, but she has always let him do whatever he wants, and she does not stop him. She cannot quite protect him, either, but she tries—she tries for both of them. Zuko loves his mother. He cannot imagine, cannot comprehend, what Katara must be dealing with. 

Her eyes are bleary as she wakes up to his low smile. He has not been sleeping much. He has never really slept much—there is too much to be done. To be half as decent as Azula at bending, he must work twice as hard. Then he overcompensates further with his swords, and then he sits and reads voluntarily into the day. Even when he is in the Caldera, he holds his hands to his face underneath his bed’s curtains and reads. 

Zuko doesn’t have a story he thinks will comfort her, so instead he drops himself in her hands. She’s still out of it, her hair mussed against her pillow, and she stares at him for a moment before rolling over and off her bed. Zuko lurches forward and grabs her side before she falls completely off. “Katara!”

“Whoa—Zuko,” she sighs. “It’s early.”

There are tear tracks on her face. He remembers her sobbing into his chest yesterday, and takes in a deep breath and expands his lips until he is wearing a hopefully compelling smile. “It’s not early. It’s the afternoon.”

“Oh,” she perks up a little before she falls back into her pillows. Her lips fall, and so does her expression; Zuko hates how different she is, how sad she seems, how these past few days have changed her. “My mom—”

“Is she okay?”

Zuko doubts anything has changed between this night and the last, and Katara’s distraught head-shake confirms his suspicions. “It’s time to get up, anyway,” he says, after a depressing pause.

“I don’t want to.”

Her eyes are full of tears again. “Katara—”

She falls back into the covers, and his heart breaks, torn apart with her every stuttering gasp. He reaches for her arms and draws her back up just as her door opens. “Sweetheart—”

Zuko freezes, holding Katara in his arms, dressed in his entirely Fire Nation clothing, the window open behind him. Hakoda looks at him blearily, and he has never been so terrified. When Kya had found him and Katara together, he had a _reason_ to be there. There is no explanation for why he has snuck into her room from the window in the late afternoon. And Hakoda is stocky and strong, a true chief. 

Unfortunately, it’s too late to run away. Katara’s hands are now wrapped around his wrists, and he couldn’t push away if he wanted to. He can’t run back outside, either; Zuko just stands incredibly, terribly still. Perhaps Hakoda will think he’s a Fire-Prince looking statue. Perhaps. 

Hakoda takes in a deep breath at the doorframe, running his eyes over the scene. “Katara,” he states, simply. Zuko takes in the circles under his eyes, and he feels terribly, terribly dishonorable. Not only does this man have to deal with his wife’s sickness, but now a strange boy next to his daughter. 

“Sir, I’m so sorry—” he attempts to pull away, but Katara drags onto his hands and keeps him grounded, and a blush rises to his cheeks. 

“Dad,” she says. “This is Zuko.”

Zuko is able to babble out something else incoherent, but Katara moves a hand to his mouth until he tastes salty skin. He sighs and accepts his defeat as the father and daughter have a strange eye-contact battle. By the end of it, Hakoda faces him, looking much more tired than angry. “Son of Ozai,” he phrases in a way that bites at Zuko’s sensibilities, reminding him just why he is here—just why Katara’s parents know his. His father is not a good person in his home, nor at the trade talks. “Join us for breakfast.”

Zuko has already eaten lunch, but he quickly nods out his acceptance of the invitation, cringing back as he thinks just what his countless etiquette teachers would think of him right now. Katara removes her hand from his mouth, and he stares at the ground, internally chastised. “Of course, Chief Hakoda.”

Hakoda pauses a second at the door, glancing at Katara. She does something like roll her eyes at him. The notion is hilarious, and he’s glad that she can be like this—she seems playful, less destroyed. When Hakoda leaves she gets up and sprints to her closet, taking out a change of clothes before running to the bathroom and locking herself in. Zuko doesn’t really know what to do in the moments in-between, so he sits on the floor and pulls his knees up to his face. He wonders what the water tribes eat for breakfast on Ember Island. Do they even have servants? He doesn’t remember. 

Sokka and Katara are not royalty, not the same way he is. He is glad, too, that Hakoda did not give him so blatantly away. He does not want to be Prince Zuko to Katara. 

She removes herself from the other room, one for washing, looking better than she did before. Her hair, however, is still a mess. Zuko bites his lip, but he’s terrible at compliments, and tells her that, albeit in nicer terms. “Your hair looks cool.”

Tears brim up in Katara’s eyes, and he wants to slap himself. “My mom does my loopies and my hair,” she says, and he realizes that’s what’s missing—the blue loopies that hang at the forefront of her locks. Usually the rest of her hair is done away, too, but right now it’s a massive bunch at the back of her head, thick. 

He doesn’t think twice before saying his next words. “I can braid your hair.” He can’t do the loopies, and it wouldn’t be right of him too. But he’s practiced on his mother, and young Azula, and even sometimes the dolls she throws away. His hair is decently long, but Fire Nation boys don’t wear braids; it’s tied up in a ponytail, far thinner and darker than hers. “If that’s okay?”

“Yeah,” she sniffs. “It’s okay.” Her tone is rough but she reaches over to steal a ribbon from her bedside table, and Zuko knows that this is just her fear talking. He grabs the ribbon as she sits down on the bed. 

“How are you feeling?” he asks, gathering the hair into bunches, attempting to smoothen it out. “Do you have a comb?”

She hands it to him, and he takes out the tangles as her breathing evens out, rhythmically moving the brush through her hair. He tries not to tug too hard—that means some patches stay rough, but it’s worth not hurting her. 

“It hurts.”

Katara’s not talking about the comb. “I’m sorry.”

“I mean . . . she’s fine. I’m gonna . . . I should spend time with her. She’s been sleeping, but . . .”

“Yeah,” he shakes a little as he runs the comb through her hair, feeling its head. The brown looks so strange against his fingers. “I’ll leave.”

“You have to stay for breakfast.”

He doesn’t want to, but her voice sounds small, so he agrees. “Okay.”

Zuko lets the comb fall back into her hand and then separates her hair into three parts, smooth and lustrous. He knits the strands together quickly, trying not to leave any lumps. Katara sits quietly, and he ties it back with the ribbon. It’s not beautiful, but he tried his best. When Katara feels the final tug, she turns around. He sighs in relief when he sees her eyes, less puffy than they have been. She moves forward and hugs him, and he heats himself up and presses his hands around her too. 

“Thank you.”

He doesn’t have words to express what he wants to say, so he doesn’t speak. 


	11. Girl

**The Twenty-Eight Mansions** **  
** **_Black Tortoise of the North_ ** **_  
_ **

##  _Nǚ, ‘Girl’_

“A friend is known when needed.” (Arabic Proverb)

* * *

  
  


Southern Water Tribe food on Ember Island is not very different from what he is used to. He sits next to Katara and Sokka on a table, a light breakfast of porridge and fruit in front of him. It’s not very elaborate, but it’s something he enjoys. He’s curious about whether Katara’s family employs servants—he doesn’t think they do, though he sees a woman in the kitchen. She is likely just aiding them with Kya out of the picture. When he’d last come here Kya had managed the kitchen. 

He’s a hungry boy, so he eats up his serving of the porridge with relish—still, he’s not comparable to Sokka, who scarfs down the food intently, as though he can truly eat away his feelings. Sometimes he thinks Uncle does that, though nothing super bad has ever happened to him. Hakoda stares at him, between his children, and Zuko is too nervous to start a conversation. His etiquette teachers would be inflamed, but they’re not here, and he’s fine. 

When Zuko finishes his bowl, he puts it down. Katara is staring into her’s, half full, with a strange look on her face. He moves his hand underneath the table and places it on top of her lap, lightly, more as a comfort than a caress. He’s always enjoyed showing affection, far more than his father ever allowed for—Azula, too, has never liked it, but he hugs his mother and likes to crawl up into himself when he sleeps sometimes. The heat is comforting, the simple sense that someone cares. 

She snivels quietly and he drops the piece of fruit in his other hand to stare at her, worried. Silence suddenly reigns across the table, and he can see Hakoda look at him with his eyebrows downcast. Sokka is still focused on his food, as though that’s going to fix whatever situation this is. But Zuko also isn’t self-absorbed enough to think this conversation is about him. “Is she doing okay?”

Katara reaches her fingers up and runs them around his, under the table. Hakoda leans back, his own plate abandoned. “She’s . . .” he starts, as though he wants to say something positive. Then he ignores Zuko and turns to Katara. “The healer said she might wake up in the next hour or two. You should go—”

Katara drops her spoon and lightly drags her fingers out of his and sprints out of the main room, the braid he’d woven spinning in her hair. He looks after her and a frown graces his features. 

“Did you do her hair?”

“Um—”

“Katara is terrible at braiding,” Sokka says quietly through his teeth, inches away from a piece of fruit. “She didn’t do that.”

“Yeah, I did,” he admits. 

Hakoda sighs. “Perhaps you should go and follow her, then. Kya won’t be waking up for a while, and I want her to—” Hakoda looks as though he’s about to cry, or sob, or something Zuko can’t quite put his finger on. It’s a look and a feeling he personally finds incredibly familiar, because he can see himself like that in the mirror. But Fire Lord Azulon and his father, and even Uncle, they don’t act like that. Leaders are supposed to be strong. 

Prince Ozai wouldn’t seem even the slightest bit distressed if Princess Ursa was on her deathbed, Zuko knows that. He thinks he prefers Hakoda’s honesty. “Where—”

“Second room on the left.”

He stacks his plates together and moves past Sokka before quietly padding his way through the hall and the room he was directed to. A door is open, and he slides his way into it. Katara is sitting in a chair next to a bed, looking over a figure laid across the sheets. It must be Kya. 

It feels like this is a moment he shouldn’t be intruding on, at all, and he wants to turn back—but his fingers scrape the door side and he stumbles, and Katara turns to stare at him. She has her mother’s fingers in her hand, and her eyes look dry and wet at the same time, as though they’ve exhausted themselves of tears. He should leave, and he sort of wants to, but at the same time—Katara looks so distraught. He pauses there, unsure of what to do. 

Katara doesn’t gesture for him to come on, nor for him to go away, so he loiters there, hoping he’s offering some sort of emotional support. He stares at her, and she stares at her mother. He can’t see Kya’s face, and he doesn’t want to. This is not his loss to live, and he doesn’t know how he, himself, could face someone who is about to die. He doesn’t need to look closer to know that this is—in fact—a deathbed.

He doesn’t like his father, but he wouldn’t wish this on his worst enemy. His arms rest against the doorframe and help him stay upright as he takes in Katara’s parent’s room. It’s a water tribe blue, of course, covered with cushions. In the corner there’s a bouquet of white flowers. 

This is the Fire Nation. The flowers are beautiful, but white means death. 

He doesn’t know how much time passes, staring at them, but it’s perhaps moments until someone else is at his side. The hand on his shoulder is hefty, and he knows who it is. “Chief Hakoda.”

He is, genuinely, very surprised that the chief has not kicked him out of his house yet, and that he is letting him stand here. Then he hears another sniffle, close to him, and he doesn’t need his absurdly good sense of hearing to understand that the man is truly crying. 

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re a good—you’re a good child, Prince Zuko. I had my suspicions, but—”

“Not prince,” he says without thinking twice. “I’m not—”

“Alright, then.” They both look at Kya and Katara, and then Hakoda starts again. “I love her,” he says quietly. 

It seems more of a statement to himself than something that deserves a response. 

“I’ve loved her since I was a child, since before I knew what love was.” He continues, quietly. “It’s a special kind of love, that. It makes loss a lot harder.”

Zuko doesn’t know what to say, so he stays silent. When Kya’s eyes open, he leaves. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updates are gonna go from 1-2 days to 2-4, sorry! I write on inspo and busy days are coming up :(


	12. Emptiness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: There is child abuse mentioned here. Please skip to the end to read exactly what.

**The Twenty-Eight Mansions** **  
****_Black Tortoise of the North_ ** **_  
_**

#  _Xū, ‘Emptiness’_

“What is learned in childhood is like etching in stone.” (Middle Eastern Proverb)

* * *

  
  


“Zuko,” Ozai says into his glass of wine, sitting proudly at one head of the table. Luckily, Uncle Iroh—Crown Prince Iroh—is at the other, sipping his jasmine tea and looking out at the side of their house—the view by the ocean. Ozai likely won’t do much with his brother next to him. “I met with Master Shu earlier today. He said you were not well-rested enough during your training sessions. This is inappropriate. Fix it.”

“Father,” he starts and then stops himself after his mother looks at him through the corners of her eyes and Azula quickly squeezes his thigh once, then twice. This is not the day to try his father’s patience. “Of course, Father. I will be better.”

“I will be better,” Ozai mocks against his glass, eyes dilated, his voice raising a bit. The servants who are about to bring in their meal loiter at the entrance, not wanting to serve lunch to the angry son of Azulon. “It is always about what you can be. Have you ever met expectations? Prince Zuko . . .” He slams his glass down onto the table and half of the contents inside of it spill onto the crimson tablecloth, leaving a dark, bloody stain there. “Barely a prince . . .”

“Ozai,” Iroh speaks out from across the table. Uncle has the same reputation as his father in terms of temper—something Zuko has never understood, because they are not the same. Uncle loves him and Lu Ten and Azula unconditionally. Uncle has only ever praised his bending progress—he makes it a point to only encourage Zuko’s failures. Uncle is powerful but he is a good man in most ways. “This is unnecessary. I feel that Zuko may be overworking himself. You are all on vacation, are you not? He can train more intensely when we go back to the Caldera. Tell me, children,” he addresses them, “how you have been having fun here. We always had fun when we came here as children, Ozai and I. I hope that you are as well.”

“The difference,” Ozai smarts, “is that we were both capable firebenders—”

“I took Azula and her friends to the Ember Island Players yesterday,” Ursa intervenes. Zuko’s mother does not often use her voice as strength, but she’s emboldened in the face of Iroh’s approval. Ozai gives her a dirty look, his eyes sparking in her direction, and as the servants come and settle down dishes in front of them, he then turns once more to his son. 

“So Azula has been spending time with her friends. And you? I hope you’ve been able to maintain relations with the sons of that governor. And perhaps from the Earth Kingdom . . . but too much mingling would be remiss.”

“You have those water tribe friends, don’t you, Prince Zuko?” Iroh asks, and Zuko feels something cold crawl over his heart. His father’s gaze, mercurial, has him freeze where he sits and reach out and grab Azula’s hand. He has talked to Uncle about Katara, and somewhat Sokka. He has never mentioned either of them to his father. He has not mentioned Katara to his father. 

He is terrified what will happen when Ozai learns about the only good part of him. He wonders what would happen then, if his father would take Katara away. Zuko has not spent a life with her but she feels like all the good parts of him, all the parts which are quiet here. He does not know who he would be without her and he is fourteen. 

But though Zuko knows to keep his tongue on a leash when around his father . . . he is fourteen, and he is not like Azula—not controlled. He is somewhat brash and he knows he compounds upon his punishments by talking to his father like this, but he cannot take some forms of humiliation. And it would feel like he would be destroying a part of himself, a part kept in stories which wander across the horizon, if he lied about Katara. 

“I do,” he says succinctly, biting his tongue to stop himself from elaborating. 

“Ah,” Iroh says. “And how are they doing? I’ve heard that the chief’s wife has been going through an ailment.”

Zuko does not look at his father. He hates that he is, but he’s afraid to look at his father. He has never been permanently burnt by his father, but there are light scars across his back. He doesn’t know if his mother or sister know about them. They don’t talk about his father. 

Zuko values the truth about Katara more than anything his father can do to him. He values Katara more than anything Ozai can do to him. He values his honor and integrity more than any pain his father can inflict on him. 

“She has. They’re very sad about it, too. I think,” he gulps down his water and admits what he’s too scared to say to Katara’s face— “that she’s going to pass.”

He will not look at his father. 

“You are lazing away at your firebending sessions,” he hears through gritted teeth, “because you are spending your time with _peasants?”_

“Ozai . . .” Iroh seems a little shocked, though not surprised at the same time. “This is a delicate time.”

Zuko will not look at his father. “They’re not peasants,” he mutters. “They’re as good as royalty. And they’re—”

“Look at me.”

He will not look at his father. 

“Are you going to tell me, Prince Zuko, that you—Prince of the Fire Nation—are spending your time having _fun_ with water tribe peasants?”

He won’t respond to his father either. 

“It is not a time to be like this,” Iroh chastises his brother. “They are going through a difficult time right now and Chief Hakoda and his children must be suffering—”

“Great!” Ozai says loudly, pushing his glass completely off the table. The wine falls across the dishes laid on the cloth and then onto Azula’s lap. She stays silent as the crimson soaks her robes. “Let those peasants suffer. My son will have nothing to do with them. They are ridiculous company to keep—”

“No they’re not,” Zuko bites. “They’re amazing and their mother is about to die—”

“And?” Zuko does not need to look at his father because his father has raised himself from his seat and is now in his frame of sight. He will consider this a victory, no matter what. Today, Ozai moved to Zuko. Zuko did not let his father define him. “Let the woman rot.”

There is an intake of breath from the entire table. Ozai continues, his marble-hard eyes staring into his son, steps away from him. “One day,” he breathes sparks, “you will understand that some people deserve to be on this earth more than others. One day you will put down your books and realize who the people are who matter. And one day you will realize that these peasants of yours are worthless. That they are no better than the bugs which get caught on the bottom of your boots.” He leans closer. “One day, Prince Zuko, you will really be my son.”

Then he slaps Zuko. Zuko sits there still and lets the sensation of that reverberate through his skull. He will not move. He doesn’t want to think about what his father said and he does not want to move.

Iroh seems incredibly dismayed at the display and raises himself as Ozai stalks out of the dining room. “What in the world,” he musters. “After our father . . .”

Zuko can feel the pink his left cheek must be, but he ignores it and looks at Azula, at his side, sitting in a pool of wine, her face warring with emotions that don’t look at home painted across her features. 

“Will you train with me?” he asks.

Azula nods as their mother looks faint on the table. When she steps up, Zuko notices there is a cut on her arm, a small shard of broken glass impaled in her skin. 

He will not let his father win. He will not let his father take Katara away from him. He will not let his father . . . he is growing more powerful with age. His father has blackmailed his mother into silence and politics determine how his uncle acts but Zuko will not be beholden to expectations. He will be better than his father. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS: Zuko notes that Ozai has burnt him in the past. Ozai slaps Zuko. 
> 
> Sorry for updating exactly three months late. I've gotten back into this story and split it into three parts--a series--rather than an incredibly long fic. Let's hope I can follow through now! Thank you for sticking with me.


	13. Rooftop

**The Twenty-Eight Mansions** **  
** **_Azure Dragon of the East_ **

****

#  _ Wēi, ‘Rooftop’ _

‘The distance between heaven and earth is no greater than one thought.’ (Mongolian Proverb)

* * *

  
  


When Zuko slides into Katara’s house in the early hours of the morning the next day, pushing through the window and into her room, it isn’t her resting on her bed—it’s her father. 

But Hakoda doesn’t seem angry. Instead, he seems relieved. Zuko hides into the wall when he sees the man sitting there, turning his face a bit to the side to hide the pink stain there that won’t go away. 

“Prince Zuko,” he says, and the title makes Zuko want to crawl up into a ball and forget the world. “It’s good to see you. Could you do me a favor?”

Zuko looks at the man and thinks of what he had been told all those nights ago.  _ “I’ve loved her since I was a child, since before I knew what love was. It’s a special kind of love, that. It makes loss a lot harder.” _

It does. He cannot imagine what Chief Hakoda is going through, and he really does not want to. “Of course, sir.”

The man’s face is creased in all the places which make him look as though he has lived an eternity amongst the stars, limp and deathly, like he is barely keeping himself together. “Katara has not let go of her mother for more than a day now—please, take her out of the home. To the beach, on a walk, something. I cannot watch her like this.”

Of course Katara wants to spend every waking moment she can with her mother—her mother who, last he knew, had not woken in hours. He asks Hakoda the same question through eyes, and he receives a shake of the head in response. 

Katara has been laying vigil at her mother’s side for ages. He wonders what kind of thoughts must be rising through her mind—he wonders how much he may be thinking about loss. For moments, he thinks about his father, and how he would feel if the man died, and then his mother. If Ursa was suffering Ozai would spend time looking for a new wife. If Ozai was dying Zuko would feel regret that he would not live long enough for his son to truly show him the consequences of his actions. 

He’s learned a lot so far from this family—now, he realizes that he is learning about love. 

“Absolutely, Chief Hakoda,” Zuko almost chokes, overwhelmed from the inside out with the enormity of feeling. Then he slides past the chief, laying on Katara’s sheets, and slides out her door. He knows the way to Kya’s room and his feet lead him there. He stares at his crimson boots, tries to ensure they don’t thud too hard against the wood. That feels as though it would be wrong, fragile. This house is so silent. He cannot even hear the birds outside. 

He creaks open the door to Kya’s room and sees the woman laying awfully still on her bed. Katara’s head is on her lap, bent forward from where she’s sitting down. She looks incredibly uncomfortable, and any doubts Zuko had about intruding upon the moment leave him as he reaches out to her, wanting to ensure she doesn’t wake with a broken back. He takes her shoulders and heaves her off Kya, trying not to face the woman’s pale, almost ghost-like features. It takes quite a bit of strength, but Zuko can do that. Zuko is strong. He manages to push Katara back until she’s leaning against the chair, and he steps back after he does. 

He looks at Katara, who looks so breakable in this light, bags under his eyes. He thinks about Katara, who is secrets and good things. He doesn’t think about the punishment which is surely awaiting him at home and what his father will do with him if he is caught. He thinks about stealth training and the swords lesson Lu Ten helps him at. He will avoid his father for this. 

“Prince Zuko,” a voice says lightly, and Zuko jumps back before turning his gaze to Kya—her eyes are open, wide as though they have been that way for a moment—as though she was looking at Zuko, who was looking at Katara. “Hello.”

Zuko blinks at her. With her blue eyes open at him, Kya resembles her daughter so well. “I’ll wake up Katara—” he moves forward. 

“No,” she shakes her head a bit, wanely. “I have a little time yet. Go out with her. Release her mind. It would not do her well to worry about me.”

Zuko swallows and nods and meets Kya’s gaze again. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I hope you feel better.”

“You’re a good boy, Zuko,” Kya smiles at him. “Take care of her, won’t you?”

She doesn’t break contact with him, but he knows what she means. “She can take care of herself.”

The flat line of Kya’s lips move up, as though she’s finding energy to smile. “I know. But stay with her, anyway.”

The silence lasts across them for a moment, and Zuko feels like he is stealing time from someone. He looks across at Katara and when he sees Kya again her eyes are closed. 

“Thank you,” he says, loudly. It is that sound which rises Katara from her slumber, and she blinks into the quiet between them. Zuko steps closer to her as she notices him and smiles lightly. 

“Hi Zuko,” she says, then seems confused. “Why are you here?”

“I wanted to take you somewhere,” he lets one corner of his mouth turn up. When Katara twists her eyebrows at that he feels a fire burn in his throat and reaches a hand down to her. She grasps it and stands up. 

“I shouldn’t leave my mom.”

“It won’t take long. You can come back afterwards.”

“Zuko,” Katara looks fearfully at him, “I don’t want to lose my mom.”

His breath hitches in his throat. Those eyes. “You won’t.” He isn’t lying.

“I trust you,” she says and grabs his arm to pull herself up. It takes a moment, but she turns her back to her mother. Zuko slides down her clothes until their hands are touching, and he leads her carefully out of the room, out of her house, onto the streets of Ember Island. 

It’s early enough in the morning that this place isn’t too busy, the sun rising across the horizon—Zuko drags Katara quickly over rocks and rough sidewalk, moving as fast as he can. “Slow down!” she begs.

“I can’t,” he insists, holding her tighter as he crosses into a small alley. Katara yelps as he stops in the middle of it and then turns another corner, into a dark place in which even the rising sun’s light isn’t able to reach. Katara slows and tugs back at his hand. 

“This place is a little scary,” she says, and Zuko lights up his hand and illuminates the space. It’s a dingy corner but there’s a ladder at its side, leading up into more darkness. 

“Go up there,” he points to it. 

“There,” Katara seems shocked. “Zuko, that’s a little . . . I don’t think I can do that.”

“Yes you can,” he slides his hand out of her and moves his arm—the one which isn’t on fire—across her shoulders, guiding her to the ladder. “I’ll catch you if you fall.”

Her mouth forms a wide circle. “You promise?”

Zuko thinks about her mother. “Yeah,” he says. “I promise.”

Katara starts up the ladder and Zuko waits till he hears a tell-tale thump—one that means she’s reached the top of the building. He extinguishes the flame in his left hand and hops up the ladder himself, quickly. When he reaches the roof of the Ember Island Theater, Katara is already leaning against the stone there, staring into the sunrise. 

“This is amazing,” she whispers, and he slides up next to her, watching the sun rise. A small rush of energy floods through his body, and as he breathes he feels alight. His inner flame comes to life and he sighs out with it. 

Katara turns to face him and her face immediately grows concerned—she reaches for the right side of his face and thumbs it a bit. The skin is still a bit red—his father had slapped hard yesterday. Zuko doesn’t know why he feels odd when Katara’s cool fingers touch him, but he carefully moves them off. 

  
“What happened?” she asks. 

“Nothing important,” Zuko smiles at her and leans back into the heat. Katara looks as though she wants to question him further, but she doesn’t. Instead she lays down and reaches for his hand again. 

“Tell me something, Zuko? Not even a story. Something cool.”

“Of course,” he thinks hard and fast for what he can tell now. “Katara?”

“Yeah?”

“You rise with the moon, I rise with the sun,” he blurts out. Katara giggles. 

“What does that mean?”

“You know the thing . . . about how firebenders get their strength from the sun?”

“Of course.”

“The dragons were the original firebenders—they gave fire to the firebenders. And that’s a well-known myth. But there’s something else there which has always interested me. It’s about living forever.”

“Oh,” Katara blinks. “I didn’t think people could live forever.”

“I mean, I don’t think they can—that’s why it’s a myth, right? But yeah, the myth says that not only did the dragons bring fire to the firebenders, but that they also brought the elixir of immortality between the Spirit World and our world. They meant to give it to Agni, who was already a god, but rumors and stories say that it’s been lost.”

“Do you think people can live forever?”

“I think it’s a myth that there may be a way for people to live forever. That’s why I think it’s important to keep stories like this as they are—stories. But there have been legends passed down throughout my family for years about the elixir of immortality. My library at home is full of them.”

“People really want to live forever,” Katara summarizes, and Zuko laughs and lays back. “But they shouldn’t want to. The beauty of life comes from valuing what we can of it.”

“That’s . . . a lot,” Zuko says carefully. “Are you okay?”

He hears a sniffle, and when he turns to the side and holds Katara’s hand delicately between his own he sees a small tear roll down her cheek. He’s scared to touch it— _ elixir of life,  _ much?

“I’m fine,” she says. “Everything ends. That’s okay. That’s how the spirits will it.”

“You’re strong,” Zuko tells her, leaning closer in. They both stay quiet as the sun makes its way completely over the horizon, right in their line of sight. Zuko breathes in the warmth and feels strength fill him—not just from the chi paths across his body, but also through his mind.  _ Take care of her.  _ He doesn’t need to, but he will anyway. Katara’s mind is her own. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking with me! 
> 
> So in Hindu mythology, there are different theories about how fire was gifted to humans. Rather than the myth of Agni, some Indo-European cultures believed that there were birds that transferred fire from the gods to the humans. Here, those birds are dragons. 
> 
> There's also a myth that Soma--the drink which allows 'immortality' in those who drink it--was sent between Earth and the heavens using these birds.[ (Soma is called Haoma in Iranian Cultures and comparable to the Greek drink ambrosia). ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_\(drink\))
> 
> Anyway, I thought this was pretty interesting. [Here's a bit of an explanation on this travel using quotes from the Vedas. ](https://books.google.com/books?id=ajLoN2yuZbwC&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q&f=false)
>
>>   
> **Varuna** : 'Come, Manu who loves the gods wishes to sacrifice. When you have completed the ritual you will live in darkness, Agni. Make the paths which lead to the gods easy to go upon; carry the offerings with a benevolent heart.'  
>   
>  **Agni** : 'The brothers of Agni formerly ran back and forth on this business like a chariot house upon a road. Out of fear of this I went far away, Varuna. I fled like a buffalo before the bow-sting of a hunter.'  
>   
>  **Varuna and the other gods** : 'We will make a lifespan free of age for you, Agni Jātavedas, so that you will not be injured when you have once been harnessed. Then with a benevolent heart you will carry the portion of the offering to the gods, O well-born one.'  
> 
> 
> Thank you for reading and sorry for the info dump! Have a great day <3 


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